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

Sue Ellen
> 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.
Sure enough. But at least we could help proposing at least one. :-)
> 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.
Yes, this is a good use case for mapping, either SKOS-to-SKOS mapping, 
or mapping from some RDF dialect to another. You know it's one of my 
favourite topics.
> 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.
I've been searching the W3C I18n Activity 
http://www.w3.org/International/ which looks to me the place where such 
things should happen, but it looks like at first sight there is no 
connection between this activity and the SW activity. I will investigate 
further.
> It's a bad time of year to hope to catch everybody monitoring their 
> email!
Indeed. By the way, Happy Xmas to all :-)

Bernard
> 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 
> <mailto: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
>     <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>
>     > <mailto: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/ <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>
>     <mailto:tbaker@tbaker.de <mailto:tbaker@tbaker.de>> -
>     >     baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de
>     <mailto:baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de> <mailto:
>     baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de <mailto:baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de>>
>
>
> <mailto:sewright@neo.rr.com>


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Received on Thursday, 21 December 2006 17:26:23 UTC