Make room for places whose data are incomplete.
Imagine you search for your community and see a blank score. Missing data do not tell you whether the place matters. They tell you which evidence is available for this particular comparison. Keeping the place visible lets you continue the research.
The world city search, country profiles, and published rankings have different source coverage and purposes. Read the geography and observation period before moving a fact from one view to another. A postal ZIP, a Census ZCTA, and a metro describe different areas.
The Census ZCTA explanation helps explain that distinction. For each source below, you can see what is included, what is missing, and which questions need more evidence.
Try this: When you find a gap, record the missing measure and geography. Use available facts to ask a useful local question while the gap stays visible.
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A full reference catalog. Clear scoring boundaries.
The discovery catalog includes all 249 ISO 3166-1 countries and territories, plus two additional World Bank reporting entries: Kosovo and Channel Islands. It is generated from complete reference catalogs rather than a selected-country list. The 79 World Bank aggregate groups are kept in the source download separately from country and economy comparisons.
ISO codes and World Bank reporting codes are labeled according to their source. The provisional discovery catalog does not replace the governed National Data System country and identity registries. The map uses World Bank capital/reference coordinates where supplied. Places without coordinates remain in the searchable list; the map is schematic.
What is connected today?
Explore the five component guides, six pillar guides, and 15 reviewed source guides.
| Layer | Coverage | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| World geography discovery | 251 catalog entries | All reference countries and territories, with additional source reporting economies. Search, profiles, and mission worksheets are available regardless of score coverage. |
| World Bank country context | 217 reporting economies · 12 indicators · 4 calculated measures | All non-aggregate catalog economies, with missing series and observation years retained. This is national context, not an industry or partnership score. |
| Country Readiness V1 | 121 published scores · 2024 reference edition | Four equally weighted measures, complete inputs required. All 251 discovery entries remain visible. View scores and coverage. |
| Commercial conversion source | 15 countries in the reviewed release | The current upstream source has a narrower evidence universe. It must be expanded with documented conversion evidence before scores can extend everywhere. |
| Published ready research leads | 69 leads · 10 countries · 48 U.S. CBSA markets | The complete current ready-lead table. Its countries do not define the website's geography catalog. |
| Screened international city model | 1,722 candidate rows · 1,647 shortlist rows | Source totals from certification. The supplied review sampled 200 rows of each larger table; the full city records are awaiting complete export. |
| Worldwide GeoNames place facts | 5,232,099 populated-place records · 248 observed source country codes | Every feature-class P row from the complete official world file retrieved October 20, 2026. No country, population, or ready-lead filter. Includes city sections and former places; read the feature type. |
| NDS governed city source | About 4.78 million canonical rows in the reviewed catalog estimate | The NDS source and screened model have their own provenance and version. Their full candidate/score tables still await complete export and reconciliation. The newly connected public GeoNames facts do not replace certified scores. |
| U.S. community evidence | 2,156 country-origin bridge rows · 58,103 U.S.-market match rows | Source certification totals. Full published tables and identity mapping evidence are needed to expand beyond the current ready-lead subset. |
Make the city universe visible.
The existing foreign-city scoring model uses a minimum known population of 50,000, up to 250 cities per country, up to 25 cities per country–U.S.-market lead, and a 75-city shortlist per U.S. metro. Its country summary intentionally keeps the top five cities per metro–country lead. These rules explain the screened output; they do not define every community worth discovering.
The expanded geography layer is designed to retain small places, missing population values, and locations without a conversion score. The connected world city and place search preserves GeoNames IDs, source country codes, first administrative areas, feature types, coordinates, population fields, time zones, and record-change dates. Search loads the relevant part of the source, and results are paginated. The full NDS scored-candidate and U.S. community layers still need their separate export and review.
City facts and country language context
The official allCountries file contains 13,474,760 geographic features. We retained every one of its 5,232,099 feature-class P records, including 290,138 records with a positive population below 500. No minimum population was applied. The 4,744,145 records with a source population of zero remain available and are labeled for checking. A zero field is not treated as a confirmed count of current residents.
The place record supplies its source name, plain-letter spelling, WGS84 coordinates, first administrative-area code, source feature type, population field, time zone, and last modification date. The latter is not a population observation year. These geographic features are not always city governments or metropolitan areas.
Languages are taken from GeoNames countryInfo.txt and resolved to names using its language-code file. They are explicitly labeled as country context, not city language shares, official-language status, or an individual’s language ability. No city-level language count has been connected. Source names, codes, and ambiguous place types remain visible.
GeoNames data is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The source manifest records all file URLs, retrieval date, source update headers, SHA-256 hashes, counts, and field definitions. Read the GeoNames field guide.
Match communities without changing their identity.
The broader ACS birthplace publication contains U.S. community records at ZCTA geography, with estimates, margins of error, and semantic mapping status. A complete source export is needed to connect these records. A ZCTA is not a CBSA metro; governed geography allocation and uncertainty rules must be established before creating additional metro scores.
Country of birth, ancestry, heritage, and regional identities remain separate evidence lenses. A country code is assigned only through a governed mapping to a specific modern country. Broad regions, historic identities, ambiguous names, and unresolved records retain their source labels and review status. They are not forced into a country. Estimates and margins of error must travel together, and community counts must not be added across overlapping lenses.
Which industries could make a connection useful?
An industry-specific commercial opportunity layer can examine a U.S. community, an international city, an industry, and a business objective together. The existing overall Sister City score does not establish which industry has the best opportunity. The industry themes on mission pages are research prompts, not scored findings.
| Commercial question | Evidence needed | Result to show |
|---|---|---|
| Can a local business find customers? | Industry supply in the U.S. market, foreign demand, product/service detail, recent trade, and verified buyers. | Export and customer opportunity, with dates and named counterpart evidence where available. |
| Can the places work together? | Complementary producers, suppliers, workforce, research institutions, and documented investment needs. | Supplier, investment, or research partnership fit, identified separately. |
| Can a relationship become a transaction? | Logistics, business travel, market-entry support, procurement routes, current requirements, and an organization responsible for introductions. | Practical access evidence, barriers to investigate, and a next step. |
| Is the opportunity producing results? | Verified introductions, qualified leads, contracts, investment commitments, completed projects, and follow-up. | Documented partnership performance, measured separately from potential. |
The industry foundation already in the source review
The reviewed databases contain governed NAICS 2022, ISIC, and NACE classification bridges; Texas business classification coverage; business-travel rankings; and Foursquare place-category coverage. Classification bridges make codes interpretable across systems. They do not prove demand, commercial relationships, or direct equivalence along every translation path. Texas coverage is not national U.S. industry coverage. Place listings describe observed establishments and source coverage, not revenue or exports.
Industry weights, scoring eligibility, comparison groups, and update periods still require a documented method and complete supporting evidence. No industry scores or worldwide city-pair rankings are published in this release. An unscored industry or location remains discoverable.
Source dates can describe different things.
An observation year identifies the period measured. A release or retrieval date identifies the version accessed. The earlier local WDI comparison found 66 different values for the same country, indicator, and year, among 192 comparisons for 16 countries. The official response also added 112 observations for 2025. Both can happen: values for an existing year can change between source versions, and a later year can become available.
Nigeria's 1960 date refers specifically to the trade-as-a-share-of-GDP series in the checked snapshot. It does not apply to its GDP, population, or internet-use series, which have recent observations, and it does not mean Nigeria has no current trade.
Reference sources
Geography: pycountry ISO 3166-1 reference data and the official World Bank country catalog, retrieved October 20, 2026. NDS source counts come from the supplied read-only source review and certification records. GeoNames totals above come from the connected full-source populated-place snapshot, with retrieval details and checks in its downloadable manifest.