Re: [Fwd: Language Ontology]

Hi Gauri,

We've done this for some of our government customers, using essentially 
the second approach you cite.  We're also in the process of relating the 
ontology to another one we've built to represent ISO 3166, which 
includes the administrative languages used by countries and 
non-sovereign territories  represented in that standard.

If you can hang out for a few days, we (Sandpiper) are just finalizing a 
version that includes both ISO 639-1 and 639-2. The approach is more of 
a hybrid of the two you present, based on customer needs.  It includes a 
fragment of ISO 1087, and also some inverse relations since there is a 
one-to-one correspondence between languages and codes.  We elected to 
create a 'Language' class, rather than 'LanguageCode', which we reuse in 
other applications; classes for Alpha-2Code and Alpha-3Code are 
subclasses of CodeElement, from ISO 5127, with instances of these codes 
as first class individuals. We use literals (via datatype properties) to 
represent the set of English, French, and in the case of 639-1 
Indigenous names.  We've also created subclasses of Alpha-3Code to 
support distinctions between bibliographic and terminologic, collective, 
and special identifiers, with individual and macrolanguages to support 
639-3.  A subsequent release will include all of the languages described 
in ISO 639-3, as well as additions to support at least some of the 
subtagging that Dan mentions, fyi.  Our intent is to publish it on a new 
portal that will become part of a new service offered by the Ontology 
PSIG in the OMG, since we've been asked to publish several ontologies in 
recent RFPs.  I'll be happy to send our preliminary version when it's 
"baked and tested", and follow up with an announcement of the new portal 
(where a revision using OMG URIs will be posted) once that's available.  
It may be a couple of months before we're ready to make that 
announcement, but we're hoping that the service will be useful to many 
of us in the Semantic Web community.

Best regards,

Elisa

Dan Brickley wrote:

>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> Language Ontology
> From:
> "Salokhe, Gauri (KCEW)" <Gauri.Salokhe@FAO.ORG>
> Date:
> Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:28:39 +0200
> To:
> DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>
> To:
> DC-GENERAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>
>
>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
>  
>