On Friday, December 9 2011, "Guy Harris" wrote to "Daoming Qiu, tz@iana.org" saying:
Perhaps there should also be a database giving names to tz database entries for human use - to use your earlier example, "Beijing, Chongqing, HongKong, Urumuqi" for Asia/{whatever city is used}, although not all systems would choose the same scheme to describe the region covered by a database entry (Mac OS X has a large list of "nearest cities").
That's what zone.tab is: CN +3114+12128 Asia/Shanghai east China - Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, etc. CN +4545+12641 Asia/Harbin Heilongjiang (except Mohe), Jilin CN +2934+10635 Asia/Chongqing central China - Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangxi, Shaanxi, Guizhou, etc. CN +4348+08735 Asia/Urumqi most of Tibet & Xinjiang CN +3929+07559 Asia/Kashgar west Tibet & Xinjiang The descriptions in zone.tab are what is intended to be presented to humans (and which should be translated by CLDR and the like); the TZID values are just labels. -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu