In this post I’ll describe the process of bringing together the region shapes from the Natural Earth dataset with the regions provided in the GeoCityLite database. In the GeoCityLite db, the regions are referenced by a two-letter ID (FIPS10-4 for some countries, ISO3366-2 for others). Initially I thought that those IDs would be same as used in the Geonames admin-level 1 region db, which brought me to the first idea of mapping the regions via name similarity.