Hi Huge,
In SNOMED CT languages and dialects are coded in the following way First, a mandatory language code from ISO639-1 ?Codes for the representation of names of languages? for representation of the language. After the ISO639-1 code is it possible to add dash and an upper-case string that identify the dialect. If the dialect is general in a whole country then a code from ISO3166 ?Codes for the representation of names of countries? is used. If the dialect is not general for a country then a code from Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA, is used. The documentation says that this approach is similar to the approach used by W3C. I think this is quite similar to what you have found. /Mikael _____ From: openehr-technical-boun...@openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Hugh Leslie Sent: den 9 juli 2007 02:34 To: For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Language tags within archetypes Ocean has been recently doing some work in translating archetypes into Chilean Spanish which is proceeding well. We have come across a minor issue with standards for language tags and wanted to get the groups opinion and consensus about where we should go with this. The current ocean archetype editor creates language tags with ISO639-1 coding i.e. [ISO639-1::es]. This becomes incorrect when a user selects a more specific language such as es-CL and we get [ISO639-1::es-CL]. This is incorrect, because ISO639-1 is only the 2 digit language code. I have done a little bit of research and it appears that what is generally used is the IETF language tags which are related to ISO but not the same. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag). Windows (the .net framework at least) seems to support IETF language tags, however they also seem to use a method of combining culture name in the format "<languagecode2>-<country/regioncode2>", where <languagecode2> is a lowercase two-letter code derived from ISO 639-1 and <country/regioncode2> is an uppercase two-letter code derived from ISO 3166. This seems to be a problematic thing. Java also seems to support the IETF tags at some level. Does anyone have an easy solution to this one? IETF is the only thing I have seen that seems to relate directly to language. Hugh -- ________________________________________________ Dr Hugh Leslie MBBS, Dip. Obs. RACOG, FRACGP, FACHI Ocean Informatics Pty Ltd M: +61 404 033 767 E: hugh.leslie at oceaninformatics.biz W: www.oceaninformatics.biz -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20070709/f526916c/attachment.html>