iamramzan/sovereign-states-dataset

Sovereign States Dataset

This dataset provides a comprehensive list of sovereign states, along with their common and formal names, membership within the UN system, and details on sovereignty disputes and recognition status. The data was originally scraped from Wikipedia's List of Sovereign States and processed for clarity and usability.

Dataset Features

• Common Name: The commonly used name of the country or state.
• Formal Name: The official/formal name of the country or state.
• Membership within the UN System: Indicates whether the country is a UN member state or has observer status.
• Sovereignty Dispute: Any sovereignty or territorial disputes involving the state.
• Further Information: Additional details regarding the state’s recognition and status.

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Dataset Details

Source

• Website: Wikipedia - List of Sovereign States
• Scraped On: [12 January 2025]
• Data Cleaning: Non-ASCII characters, unnecessary symbols, and text within brackets were cleaned for clarity.

Format

• File Type: CSV
• Encoding: UTF-8
• Number of Rows: [196]
• Columns:
  • Common Name
  • Formal Name
  • Membership within the UN System
  • Sovereignty Dispute
  • Further Information

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Citation

If you use this dataset in your research or project, please cite it as follows:

@misc{sovereign_states_dataset,

• author = {Your Name or Team Name},
• title = {Sovereign States Dataset},
• year = {2025},
• url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/your-username/sovereign-states-dataset} }

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the contributors of Wikipedia for maintaining and updating the List of Sovereign States. This dataset was scraped and processed using:

• Python
• Scrapy
• Pandas
• Regex for cleaning data

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you spot an issue or have suggestions for improvement:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Make your changes.
3. Submit a pull request.

Who are the source Data producers ?

The data is machine-generated (using web scraping) and subjected to human additional treatment.

below, I provide the script I created to scrape the data (as well as my additional treatment):

import scrapy


class StatesspiderSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'statesspider'
    start_urls = ['https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states']

    def parse(self, response):
        rows = response.xpath('//table[contains(@class, "wikitable")][1]//tr')  # Locate the main table

        for row in rows[1:]:  # Skip the header row
            common_and_formal_names = row.xpath('td[1]//text()').getall()  # First column
            membership_within_un_system = row.xpath('td[2]//text()').getall()  # Second column
            sovereignty_dispute = row.xpath('td[3]//text()').getall()  # Third column
            further_information = row.xpath('td[4]//text()').getall()  # Fourth column

            # Clean up and join text lists
            common_and_formal_names = ' '.join(common_and_formal_names).strip()
            membership_within_un_system = ' '.join(membership_within_un_system).strip()
            sovereignty_dispute = ' '.join(sovereignty_dispute).strip()
            further_information = ' '.join(further_information).strip()

            yield {
                'Common and Formal Names': common_and_formal_names,
                'Membership within the UN System': membership_within_un_system,
                'Sovereignty Dispute': sovereignty_dispute,
                'Further Information': further_information,
            }

Usage

Loading the Dataset in Python

To use the dataset in Python, you can load it using pandas:

import pandas as pd

# Load the dataset
url = "https://huggingface.co/datasets/your-username/sovereign-states-dataset/resolve/main/sovereign_states_cleaned_final.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url)

# Preview the dataset
print(df.head())