Dear Mr. Carpenter, this email is send to you, because you are listed as the secretary for the "TC 46/SC 9 Identification and description". Maybe you can forward it to the relevant office or tell me where else I can email to. I suggest that the ISO creates an ISO standard for time zone identification. Current abbreviations in the IANA time zone database are ambiguous, e.g. IST may refer to Israel Standard Time or India Standard Time. The standard could be used in the IANA time zone database and projects that collect time zone related data, e.g. laws and translations of names. Since time zone law is country related one could look whether ISO 3166 can be used. The IANA time zone database has the stated aim of being correct for all regions in the world after the year 1970. Although the earliest ISO 3166 country code standard on the ISO website is ISO 3166:1981, web search for ISO 3166 1974 gives several hits claiming the first publication was in 1974. If there have been countries between 1970 and 1974 that have no ISO 3166 code one can use codes from the user-assigned code space. So the first two letters might be ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code based. But I suggest checking whether the alpha-3 codes or numeric codes are a better fit. Further letters may then mark regions inside a country and special restricted time shifts, e.g. daylight saving time. Such a structured set could look like: AUEDT - Australia Eastern Daylight saving Time AUCDT - United States Central Daylight saving Time AUWDT - Australia Western Daylight saving Time EUEDT - EU Eastern Daylight saving Time EUCDT - EU Central Daylight saving Time EUWDT - EU Western Daylight saving Time IDEST - Indonesia Eastern Standard Time IDCST - Indonesia Central Standard Time IDWST - Indonesia Western Standard Time USEDT - United States Eastern Daylight saving Time USCDT - United States Central Daylight saving Time USPDT - United States Pacific Daylight saving Time Kind regards Tobias Conradi -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com