Re: URIs for languages

Useful sites for linguistics which deal with all general and specific issues of the use of IT in human languages:

www.clarin.eu, www.linguistlist.org and www.sil.org.

You may also want to think about open archive and repository library standards for representing human language descriptors.

For the majority of the 6,909 languages documented by ethnologue.com, in particular the small languages, creole and pidgin languages no unambiguous format exist to properly document them.

And since the semantic web is all about context for now only mainstream languages (including the most studied ancient languages) are not going to pose a problem.

 
Milton Ponson
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________________________________
 From: "Jordanous, Anna" <anna.jordanous@kcl.ac.uk>
To: "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org> 
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:15 PM
Subject: 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
 
---
Anna Jordanous
Research Associate
Centre for e-Research
King's College London
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 1988