What is it you ask?
Once in a while we need to link data to certain sources. Depending on the source, the data that we are wanting to link to may use a certain "code", or numbering system, to identify things.
The United States's Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) are sets of publicly announced standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for use in computer systems by non-military American government agencies and government contractors. These standards are often comprised of sets of "codes" or numbers that pertain to or reference certain places or things. A lot of them have been replaced with newer systems provided by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). We still use the FIPS numbers as a references to older databases.