ISO 3166-1 codes for the Semantic Web Re: [Fwd: Geonames enters the Semantic Web]

Folks

Following Dan's announce we had a lot of feedback from the SW community, 
thnks to which some notable improvements have been brought to both 
ontology and Web service
Stay tune at http://www.geonames.org/ontology/

But there is still a lot to do, and Marc is not happy so far with using 
geonames namespace for definition of countries in the RDF descriptions, 
e.g. http://www.geonames.org/countries/#GB

Says Marc :
> I am not yet completely satisfied with our country codes, there should 
> be a more standardized way of referring to iso 3166-1 country codes in 
> the semantic web.
Neither am I. In OASIS Published Subjects GeoLang Technical Committee, 
back in 2002, we tried to show the interest in providing stable URI for 
countries and languages, based on ISO codes. What we thought at the time 
was that at some point, relevant ISO committees should take care of 
that, and provide codes URI in the ISO namespace. But nothing of the 
like has happened.
We have still this provisional GeoLang page and URIs (called PSIs by 
topic maps folks) at http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso3166/.
The problem is that ISO has never shown, AFAIK, any intention to provide 
its codes as identifiers for the semantic web. I would be happy to be 
proven wrong.

So we have a few private initiatives such as 
http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-3166/ developed by Earle in cc. But nothing 
endorsed either by W3C or by ISO.
My view of that is that any set of stable URIs including the ISO codes 
is a good provisional approach.
What one can do is provide a mapping between existing instances using 
owl:sameAs
like e.g.,
http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-3166/countries#GB    owl:sameAs   
http://www.geonames.org/countries/#GB
http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso3166/#826    owl:sameAs   
http://www.geonames.org/countries/#GB

And whenever, if ever, ISO or W3C or any relevant authority provides 
URIs in its own namespace, map back the above provisional URIs to the 
authoritative list using owl:sameAs again, or rdfs:isDefinedBy - 
whatever is recommended at the time by the publishing authority.

Bottom line : Would it be in the scope of this group to pave the way 
towards publication of authoritative ISO codes URIs?

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 30 October 2006 13:44:40 UTC