Re: Need help mapping two letter country code to URI

Hi Aldo,

Note that there are multiple branches of the ISO 3166 familiy of codes. 
See pages 23 and 24 of the GoodRelations Technical Report 
(http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/GoodRelations-TR-final.pdf) 
for a more detailed discussion. I am still not aware of any 
authoritative URI schema for ISO 3166, which is why GoodRelations uses 
string literals for that code.

The key ISO page http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm does also not 
refer to any established http or URN URI schema for the ISO 3166 family 
of codes.

I assume that dbPedia URIs may be well suited, but they are not as 
authoritative. If they have ISO 3166 codes attached via properties, 
entity consolidation on that basis may be relatively simple.

Below, please find an excerpt from the discussion re identifiers for 
countries in the GoodRelations Technical Report:

Country or Region

...

GoodRelations could reuse several approaches for ontologies of regions 
and places for
specifying Countries and Regions. However, we suggest a more pragmatic 
approach of
reusing the ISO Standard 3166, in particular ISO 3166-1 (ISO, 2006) and 
ISO 3166-2
(ISO, 1998). The first defines 2- or 3-letter identifiers for existing 
countries and a few
independent geopolitical entities. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 defines 2-letter 
codes for most
countries. There exist alternative standards with 3-letter codes and a 
numerical
representation. For the following reasons, we suggest using the 2-letter 
codes: First, they
are well established and people are likely more familiar with them (they 
are also used for
most top-level domains). Second, and more important, the 2-letter 
variant is the basis for
ISO 3166-2, which breaks down the countries from ISO 3166-1 into 
administrative
subdivisions (ISO, 1998). The code elements used in ISO 3166-2 consist 
of “the alpha-2
code element from ISO 3166-1 followed by a separator and a further 
string of up to three
alphanumeric characters e. g.” (from: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-
services/iso3166ma/04background-on-iso-3166/iso3166-2.html).
This allows using simple string operations on the respective ISO 3166 
codes in order to
handle administrative subdivisions. For example, if a certain Offering 
is said to be valid
for Canada (ISO 3166-1 two-letter code “CA”), then one can infer that 
any longer search
string specifying an administrative subdivision of Canada (e.g. British 
Columbia, ISO
3166-2 “CA-BC”) is also an eligible region.
Examples: Canada (CA), Austria (AT), Canada: British Columbia (CA-BC), 
Italy (IT),
Italy: Province of Milano (IT-MI)

Note: More complex modeling of Countries and Regions may be useful in some
scenarions, and GoodRelations can be imported and extended if necessary. 
However,
most offerings on the Web contain statements on the level of countries 
only, for which
ISO 3166-1 is sufficient and very common.

Martin



Aldo Bucchi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I found a dataset that represents countries as two letter country
> codes: DK, FI, NO, SE, UK.
> I would like to turn these into URIs of the actual countries they represent.
>
> ( I have no idea on whether this follows an ISO standard or is just
> some private key in this system ).
>
> Any ideas on a set of candidata URIs? I would like to run a complete
> coverage test and take care I don't introduce distortion ( that is
> pretty easy by doing some heuristic tests against labels, etc ).
>
> There are some border cases that suggest this isn't ISO3166-1, but I
> am not sure yet. ( and if it were, which widely used URIs are based on
> this standard? ).
>
> Thanks!
> A
>
>   

-- 
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e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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