Hi Aldo,Note that there are multiple branches of the ISO 3166 familiy of codes. See pages 23 and 24 of the GoodRelations Technical Report (http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/GoodRelations-TR-final.pdf) for a more detailed discussion. I am still not aware of any authoritative URI schema for ISO 3166, which is why GoodRelations uses string literals for that code.
The key ISO page http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm does also not refer to any established http or URN URI schema for the ISO 3166 family of codes.
I assume that dbPedia URIs may be well suited, but they are not as authoritative. If they have ISO 3166 codes attached via properties, entity consolidation on that basis may be relatively simple.
Below, please find an excerpt from the discussion re identifiers for countries in the GoodRelations Technical Report:
Country or Region ...GoodRelations could reuse several approaches for ontologies of regions and places for specifying Countries and Regions. However, we suggest a more pragmatic approach of reusing the ISO Standard 3166, in particular ISO 3166-1 (ISO, 2006) and ISO 3166-2 (ISO, 1998). The first defines 2- or 3-letter identifiers for existing countries and a few independent geopolitical entities. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 defines 2-letter codes for most countries. There exist alternative standards with 3-letter codes and a numerical representation. For the following reasons, we suggest using the 2-letter codes: First, they are well established and people are likely more familiar with them (they are also used for most top-level domains). Second, and more important, the 2-letter variant is the basis for ISO 3166-2, which breaks down the countries from ISO 3166-1 into administrative subdivisions (ISO, 1998). The code elements used in ISO 3166-2 consist of “the alpha-2 code element from ISO 3166-1 followed by a separator and a further string of up to three
alphanumeric characters e. g.” (from: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods- services/iso3166ma/04background-on-iso-3166/iso3166-2.html).This allows using simple string operations on the respective ISO 3166 codes in order to handle administrative subdivisions. For example, if a certain Offering is said to be valid for Canada (ISO 3166-1 two-letter code “CA”), then one can infer that any longer search string specifying an administrative subdivision of Canada (e.g. British Columbia, ISO
3166-2 “CA-BC”) is also an eligible region.Examples: Canada (CA), Austria (AT), Canada: British Columbia (CA-BC), Italy (IT),
Italy: Province of Milano (IT-MI) Note: More complex modeling of Countries and Regions may be useful in somescenarions, and GoodRelations can be imported and extended if necessary. However, most offerings on the Web contain statements on the level of countries only, for which
ISO 3166-1 is sufficient and very common. Martin Aldo Bucchi wrote:
Hi, I found a dataset that represents countries as two letter country codes: DK, FI, NO, SE, UK. I would like to turn these into URIs of the actual countries they represent. ( I have no idea on whether this follows an ISO standard or is just some private key in this system ). Any ideas on a set of candidata URIs? I would like to run a complete coverage test and take care I don't introduce distortion ( that is pretty easy by doing some heuristic tests against labels, etc ). There are some border cases that suggest this isn't ISO3166-1, but I am not sure yet. ( and if it were, which widely used URIs are based on this standard? ). Thanks! A
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http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-ontology-1535287 Overview article on Semantic Universe: http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-web-based-e-commerce-webmasters-get-ready.html Project page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/ Resources for developers: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations Tutorial materials:CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Web_of_Data_for_E-Commerce_Tutorial_IEEE_CEC%2709
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