The name of the countries (and cities) are the official one declared at the UN. So, yeah, the official short version of UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
My own experience is that it's rather easy to draw a light map and deal with i18n. There are several open data sources and libraries. The hard problem is purely administrative. If you have data tied to most countries, there's certainly a mismatch with your source for a map, and you have to build a custom map yourself.
There is no consensus on what a country is. A few examples of divergences: Western Sahara is officially a country, but practically it's always been occupied by Morocco. Somalia is a mess, with Somaliland and Puntland being de facto independant coutries though noone acknoledge them officially. Between these two categories, Greenland, Nue and a few others are not fully independant.
The western one should be Somaliland, as you mention. The map seems to take the duck-typing approach to countries, rather than taking the official stance of any one country. There's Somaliland, Taiwan, Kosovo, Cyprus, Israel and Palestine, etc. No Northern Cyprus though.
Definitively, if you are making a map, your have to make geopolitical chooses. And yes, I have edited NE data to highlight the geopolitical choices that I think are the simplest to defend.
Do you think it is worht the effort for you to significantly improve this map?
But I'm not going to improve it significantly.
Thank you. ^^
The capital positions are the only data that is not UN sourced nor from natural earth. I will fix that.
I read your rail ads story with interest.
Great perspective.
素晴らしい視点でした from ja-JP
https://ache.one/articles/rail-and-advertising for the interested.