Re: [Fwd: Language Ontology]

Hi Misha,

We are very aware of it, and have been following the work, but I failed 
to mention it in the email.  I should say that our ontology was 
developed for offline use in an internal system, as an initial 
requirement.  Having said that, if you look at the RFCs, they only 
describe tags, not an RDF vocabulary or OWL ontology.  Our approach is 
compatible with the RFCs but adds capabilities that support co-reference 
resolution, for example, in target application.

Best,

Elisa

Misha Wolf wrote:

> This sounds very worrying as you don't seem to be aware of BCP 47.
>  
> Misha
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: www-international-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Elisa F. Kendall
> Sent: 23 April 2007 17:32
> To: Gauri.Salokhe@FAO.ORG
> Cc: 'WWW International'; Semantic web list
> Subject: 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
>>  
>>
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