Hi Scott,

Great to hear that you are looking at using international standards.  That said, for the "Region" level I believe this is problematic.  From the work I have done previously along these lines, I quickly found how problematic this was, as there isn't a single agreed upon international standard for how to define regions and which countries belong in which regions, and that selecting one standard over another can be interpreted as having political or ethnic bias.  Further, in some cases the definition of a "region" has criteria that go beyond purely geographic specifications, which just adds to the complexity.  Finally, how regions are defined can also be company specific, for purposes of defining areas of responsibility for a business function, which may not be purely geographic but more organizational.  Where I ended up on this was that the ideal solution would be one which allowed a many-to-many relationship between Region and Location, with additional metadata on the relations so that, for example, you could say that a country belongs in either Central Europe by one standard or Southeastern Europe by another standard, and that the same country may be covered within Western Europe from a Sales perspective.