URIs for languages

Hi LOD list,

I am looking for URIs to use  to represent particular languages (primarily Ancient Greek, Arabic, English and Spanish). This is to represent what language a document is written in, in an RDF triple. I thought it would be obvious how to refer to the language itself, but I am struggling.

I would like to use something like the ISO 639 standard for languages. To distinguish between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, I have to use the ISO-639-2 set of language codes. http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/ (The codes are grc and gre respectively)

http://downlode.org/Code/RDF/ISO-639/ is an RDF representation of ISO 639 but it doesn't include Ancient Greek as it only includes ISO-639-1 languages.

As far as I see, I have the following options e.g. for Arabic
Use the http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes_name.php?code_ID=22
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes-keyword.php?SearchTerm=ara&SearchType=iso_639_2
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2#ara


This really must be simpler - what am I missing? Any comments welcomed. Thanks for your help
anna

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Anna Jordanous
Research Associate
Centre for e-Research
King's College London
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 1988