Hi Bernard,
I think now we should forget about URIs published by pionneer projects
such as OASIS TC, lingvoj.org <http://lingvoj.org> and lexvo.org
<http://lexvo.org>, and stick to URIs published by genuine authority
Library of Congress which is as close to the primary source as can be.
So if you want to use a URI for Ancient Greek as defined by ISO 639-2,
please use http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/grc.
BTW Lars Marius, hello, what do you think? URIs at id.loc.gov
<http://id.loc.gov> are really what we were dreaming to achieve in
2001, right?
Now of course I may be a bit biased here, but I do not believe that the
id.loc.gov service solves
all of the problems. This is from the Lexvo.org FAQ [1]:
The advantage of using those URIs is that they are maintained by the
Library of Congress. However, there are also several issues to
consider. First of all, ISO 639-2 is orders of magnitude smaller than
ISO 639-3 and for example lacks an adequate code for Cantonese, which
is spoken by over 60 million speakers.
More importantly, the LOC's URIs do not describe languages per se but
rather describe code-mediated conceptualizations of languages. This
implies, for instance, that the French language
(<http://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/fra>) has two different counterparts at
the LOC, <http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/fra> and
<http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/fre>, which each have slightly
different properties.
Finally, connecting your data to Lexvo.org's information is likely to
be more useful in practical applications. It offers information about
the languages themselves, e.g. where they are spoken, while the LOC
mostly provides information about the codes, e.g. when the codes were
created and updated and what kind of code they are.
In practice, you can also use both codes simultaneously in your data.
However, you need to be very careful to make sure that you are
asserting that a publication is written in French rather than in some
concept of French created on January, 1, 1970 in the United States.
Best,
Gerard
[1] http://www.lexvo.org/linkeddata/faq.html
--
Gerard de Melo [dem...@icsi.berkeley.edu]
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~demelo/
