Re: Could ISO-639 languages be defined as skos concepts?

Hi Sue Ellen

Thanks for your insights. Do you have pointers to the discussions you 
mention, and/or any contact with people taking part in them, and who 
would see some interest in RDF-ization of  those resources? (assuming 
such a class definition is satisfiable).
Actually when one looks at 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry, the technical 
task of migrating its content into RDF, as long as a relevant vocabulary 
is defined, is quite trivial.
After that it's mainly a political issue. :-)
But there is a point that has not been answered so far in my original 
question. Would SKOS a relevant format for such a representation?

Bernard


Sue Ellen Wright a écrit :
> Hi, All,
> There's serious discussions going on concerning the IETF language tag 
> subtag registry and the ISO implementations of the 639 family of 
> codes, so I think it makes sense to coordinate any efforts in this 
> direction with the folks working on those two sets of standards. IETF 
> 4647 spells out means for matching codes, but it would make things a 
> lot simpler if we have a more or less standard format for representing 
> them in rdf.
> Bye for now
> Sue Ellen
>
>  
> On 12/20/06, *Thomas Baker* <baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de 
> <mailto:baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de>> wrote:
>
>
>     On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 06:54:18PM +0100, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>     > ISO-639 languages are used in XML and in RDF, and in SKOS, via
>     their
>     > code used as value of xml:lang attribute.
>     > But for various applications, it would be interesting to define
>     those
>     > languages as proper RDF resources.
>     >
>     > So far, the only attempt to do so I've found in RDF is
>     > http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/ and the description it provides is
>     > quite basic.
>     ...
>
>     > So, we have public concepts, a lot of data to mine, we have use
>     cases,
>     > all we need is a namespace to which append ISO 639 codes to
>     forge URIs.
>     > Who is likely to host and maintain that namespace?
>     > http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/language#
>     <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/language#>  ?
>     > http://purl.org/dc/language/  ?
>     ...
>     > Since I think we can wait for quite a while before ISO delivers
>     such a
>     > thing in its own namespace - and I would be happy to be proven
>     wrong
>     > here - I wonder what kind of initiative could move this thing
>     forward.
>     > Is it in DCMI intention to define those instances in its own
>     namespace
>     > (Tom, any clues on that?).
>
>     Well, I agree with the need :-)
>
>     Several years ago, we considered opening a DCMI service for the
>     "registration" of URIs identifying controlled vocabularies for
>     use as encoding schemes in metadata.  While the demand for such
>     a service was clear, the project did not look maintainable,
>     sustainable, and scalable.
>
>     Unless URIs are coined "once and for all" and "with no
>     guarantees" (and how useful is that?), it is not clear
>     how such a namespace host should operate over time.  The
>     impulse to "just do it" comes up against hard questions.
>     Even just maintaining URIs for entities in a separately
>     maintained ISO standard would involve a significant commitment.
>
>     Tom
>
>     --
>     Tom Baker - tbaker@tbaker.de <mailto:tbaker@tbaker.de> -
>     baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de <mailto:baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Sue Ellen Wright
> Institute for Applied Linguistics
> Kent State University
> Kent OH 44242 USA
> sellenwright@gmail.com <mailto:sellenwright@gmail.com>
> swright@kent.edu <mailto:swright@kent.edu>
> sewright@neo.rr.com <mailto:sewright@neo.rr.com>


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Received on Thursday, 21 December 2006 13:57:03 UTC