- From: Bernard vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:44:35 +0100
- To: public-xg-geo@w3.org
- Cc: Marc <marc@geonames.org>, Earle Martin <earle@downlode.org>
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 ---------------------------------------------------- *Mondeca** *3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France Web: www.mondeca.com <http://www.mondeca.com> ---------------------------------------------------- Tel: +33 (0) 871 488 459 Mail: bernard.vatant@mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> Blog: Leçons de Choses <http://mondeca.wordpress.com/>
Received on Monday, 30 October 2006 13:44:40 UTC