Use of Topic Map URIs WAS: Trust, Context, Justification and Quintuples

Thank-you, Jeremy Carrol, for finding this namespace; I agree the topicmap
document is more useful for country codes.  So I suppose it would be
correct to use the URI representing the country as the subject of RDF
statements.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
 <rdf:Description about="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#NU">
 <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">NIUE</rdfs:label>
 <rdfs:label xml:lang="fr">NIU&#201;</rdfs:label>
 </rdf:Description
 </rdf:RDF>

This is good.  Now, after scrutinizing the rights statement in the
topicmap documents for identifying countries and languages, I think it
would even be acceptable to use the following language URIs, though there
is no guarantee topicmaps.org will formally define them the same.

For the Acoli language, for which there is no topicmap identifier and no
ISO 2-letter code, though there is a 3-letter code:
   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#ach

And, for Klingon, using the acceptable xml:lang value defined by IANA:
   http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#i-klingon

The point is to be allowed by the namespace owner to excercise the 'X' in
'XML' when needed.*  This is not necessarily a Good Thing for all
controlled vocabularies, but for many it is.  (Think about historians who
want to talk about country:US-D1803-04-30.)  Ideally, the namespace owner
will maintain the document, keeping it current and encouraging feedback. 
One may find, for example, the concepts of, "language unknown", "language
not specified", and perhaps even,
"human-readable-but-not-really-in-any-language" (for some symbols,
acronyms, and suchlike) may be useful enough to be formally identified,
perhaps in the same namespace.

-David

*See http://prismstandard.org/Pam_1.0/PRISM_1.2h.pdf for what looks like a
very useful set of controlled vocabularies with extension within their
namespaces explicitly prohibited.  They even define URLs based on ISO-3166
for use as identifiers for countries with the cryptic footnote, "These
URLs are non-resolvable for copyright reasons."

--- Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
> 
> Patrick:
> > http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=geolang
> 
> > Look in the documents section for language.xtm and country.xtm.
> 
> Just to unpack an entry:
> 
>   <topic id="NU">
>     <instanceOf><topicRef xlink:href="#country"/></instanceOf>
>     <subjectIdentity>
>       <subjectIndicatorRef 
> xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#NU"/>
>       <subjectIndicatorRef 
> xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#N-570"/>
>       <subjectIndicatorRef 
> xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#A3-NIU"/>
>     </subjectIdentity>
>     <baseName><scope><subjectIndicatorRef 
> xlink:href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/language.xtm#en"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NIUE</baseNameString></baseName>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="#alpha2"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NU</baseNameString></baseName>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="#alpha3"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NIU</baseNameString></baseName>
>   </topic>
> 
> 
> This seems to suggest the use of any of three URIs 
> http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#NU
> http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#N-570
> http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm#A3-NIU
> 
> For the country whose name is written in English as
> NIUE
> 
> and who has two and three letter abbreviations of NU and NIU.
> 
> If I actually retrieve http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm I
> get 
> different data :(
> 
> 
>   <topic id="NU">
>     <instanceOf><topicRef xlink:href="#country-name"/></instanceOf>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="#alpha2"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NU</baseNameString></baseName>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="#alpha3"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NIU</baseNameString></baseName>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="language.xtm#en"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>Niue</baseNameString></baseName>
>     <baseName><scope><topicRef xlink:href="language.xtm#en"/>
>       <topicRef xlink:href="#uppercase"/></scope>
>       <baseNameString>NIUE</baseNameString></baseName>
>   </topic>
> 
> Having "Niue" in the standard capitalization is helpful.
> I guess having a choice of three URIs may be an improvement, although I 
> suspect having just one is better. All in all I take the current
> contents
> of 
> http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/country.xtm
> to be more useful than
> http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/1442/country.xtm
> 
> Oops I reread
> 
> http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/identitycrisis.html
> 
> and see I have completely missed the point about subject identifiers
> etc. Yes 
> that point is well-made - but it is not that subject identifiers are so
> good 
> that we need three of them! And omitting the mixed case version of the
> label 
> does appear to be a bug.
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 


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Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2004 03:22:07 UTC