I think you have a different version of an ISO-country-based timezone database than I had in mind. I was not thinking of a "location database". I think that would be far too difficult. I was trying to see if we can capture the hierarchy of timezones, as created by governing authorities, starting with ISO countries at the root. So "Canada/British_Columbia/Richmond" would exist only if it followed a different set of rules than "Canada/Pacific" (and "Canada/Pacific" would be a Link to "America/Vancouver"). The process of splitting timezones would be similar to the one used in the current TZDB project, because the entries in 'countryzones' would simply be Links to the canonical TZDB Zone entries.

But as I mentioned in my previous post, I think the scope of this 'countryzone' file is so large, it needs to be a separate project.