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

Dear Bernard et al.,
I think you are absolutely right about this not being a significant task:
the main issue is to get a variety of people from a number of communities of
practice to agree on a single approach. SKOS would certainly be one avenue.
There may be others, and in the end, we may need more than one flavor in
order to conform to requirements in a given environment, which is OK as long
as we can map successfully back and forth. I'm hoping that sooner or later
one of the guys for W3C will weigh into this discussion and let us know
whether they are already addressing this issue. It's a bad time of year to
hope to catch everybody monitoring their email! There will be an ISO TC 37
meeting in January where we'll be addressing issues regarding our own
metadata registry, and this will surely come up.
Best regards
Sue Ellen

On 12/21/06, Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> wrote:
>
> 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>
>
>
> <http://mondeca.wordpress.com/>
>
>


-- 
Sue Ellen Wright
Institute for Applied Linguistics
Kent State University
Kent OH 44242 USA
sellenwright@gmail.com
swright@kent.edu
sewright@neo.rr.com