Yoshito, The timezone meta zones are exactly the concept I was looking for. I am currently trying to synthesize that data along with the data in the zone.tab file to come up with a good list. Only problem now is, my version of Oracle is missing a lot of time zones, but I will try to do what I can. Thanks for the help. -d yoshito_umaoka@us.ibm.com wrote:

Unicode CLDR project is trying to provide "common name" and its translations.

http://cldr.unicode.org/

CLDR introduced a concept - meta zone. For exmaple, poeple in the US recognize New York and Detroit are in a same zone "Eastern Time" or "ET". So CLDR defines a "meta" zone called "America_Eastern" and several US/Canada zones are mapped to this metazone. Below is the part of data maintained by CLDR project -

<timezone type="America/New_York"> <usesMetazone mzone="America_Eastern"/> </timezone>

<timezone type="America/Detroit"> <usesMetazone mzone="America_Eastern"/> </timezone>

<timezone type="America/Toronto"> <usesMetazone mzone="America_Eastern"/> </timezone>

And metazone "America_Eastern" define display names -

<metazone type="America_Eastern"> <long> <generic>Eastern Time</generic> <standard>Eastern Standard Time</standard> <daylight>Eastern Daylight Time</daylight> </long> </metazone>

<metazone type="America_Eastern"> <short> <generic>ET</generic> <standard>EST</standard> <daylight>EDT</daylight> </short> </metazone>

These names are translated into various languages. For example, in French -

<metazone type="America_Eastern"> <long> <generic>heure de l’Est</generic> <standard>heure normale de l’Est</standard> <daylight>heure avancée de l’Est</daylight> </long> <short> <generic>HE</generic> <standard>HNE</standard> <daylight>HAE</daylight> </short> </metazone>

However, by the nature of zones in the tz database, such mappings are historic. For example, "America/Indiana/Knox" is moving back and forth between Estern Time and Central Time. See the data maintained by CLDR project below -

<timezone type="America/Indiana/Knox"> <usesMetazone to="1991-10-27 07:00" mzone="America_Central"/> <usesMetazone to="2006-04-02 07:00" from="1991-10-27 07:00" mzone="America_Eastern"/> <usesMetazone from="2006-04-02 07:00" mzone="America_Central"/> </timezone>

As you can see, your suggestion might not work well. For example, you would create a common name for above zone -

Central Time (Knox, Indiana)

But, it is not true between 1991 and 2006. Of course, you can use the current mapping only. Even in this case, you still probably need to construct a name from separated sources, not in a single text.

Anyway, CLDR has such data in XML format which can be consumed for your purpose.

-Yoshito

Douglass Davis <ddavis@northcarolina.edu> wrote on 04/20/2010 10:38:20 AM:

...

Hello All,

I am attempting to find a user-friendly list of time zones for users to select their current time zone. It would have common names that timezones are referred to, such as Eastern Time (US and Canada), and/or city names. This list should map the text to a time zone name such as "America/New_York." It would also remove multiple listings for what the user thinks of as the same time zone. Does any one know of such a list?

If not, I would like to create one.

One thing that perhaps would help is if I could group many timezones by if they are implemented exactly the same way in 2010. This would make it

...

easy to remove multiple listings for the "same" time zone. Also, if there are any time zones that are strictly there for historical purposes, I would like to not have them in the list.

I will put this list in the public domain if any other application developers want to use it.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions as far as where I could find this list, or how I could create it.

Thanks.

-- Douglass Davis Applications Developer UNC - General Administration

-- Douglass Davis Applications Developer UNC - General Administration (919) 264-1726