[Fwd: Language Ontology]

Forwarding from the Dublin Core list, in case folk here can advise.

Gauri, one thing I'd suggest as useful would be to take the concepts 
implicit in RFC 4646,

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4646.txt
see also 
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php

...and in particular the subtag mechanism, script, region, variant etc.

It would be great to have those expressed explicitly.

cheers,

Dan

attached mail follows:

Dear All, 

We are working on creating Ontology for languages. The need came up as we
tried to convert our XML metadata files into OWL. In our metadata (XML)
records, we have three types of occurrences of language information. 

<dc:language scheme="ags:ISO639-1">En</dc:language>
<dc:language scheme="dcterms:ISO639-2">eng</dc:language>
<dc:language>English</dc:language>


We have two options for modelling the language ontology:

1) Create a class for each language, assign URI to it and add all the other
lexical variations, ISO codes (create datatype property) as follows:

OWL:Thing
|_ Class:Language
	|_ Instance:URI1
		|_ rdfs:label xml:lang="en" English
		|_ rdfs:label xml:lang="es" Inglés
		|_ rdfs:label xml:lang="it" Inglese
		|_ rdfs:label xml:lang="fr" Anglais
		|_ etc.
		|_ property:hasISO639-1Code  en (string)
		|_ property:hasISO639-2Code  eng (string)
		|_ etc.
	|_ Instance:URI2
	|_ Instance:URI3
	|_ Instance:URI4


2) Create Classes called Language and Language code and make links between
instances of Language and Language Codes as follows:


OWL:Thing
|_ Class:Language
	|_ Instance:URI1
		|_ property:hasCode  en  (link to the en instance of Class
ISO639-1 below)
		|_ property:hasCode  eng  (link to the eng instance of Class
ISO639-1 below)

|_ Class:LanguageCode
	|_ SubClass ISO639-1
		|_ Instance:en
		|_ Instance:fr
		|_ etc.
	|_ SubClass ISO639-2
		|_ Instance:eng
		|_ Instance:fra
		|_ etc.
	|_ etc.

Does anyone have similar experience with modelling in OWL? Any suggestions on
which model is better and (extensible)? Does an ontology already exist that
we can reuse?

Than you, 
Gauri