Useful sites for linguistics which deal with all general and specific issues of the use of IT in human languages:
www.clarin.eu, www.linguistlist.org and www.sil.org. You may also want to think about open archive and repository library standards for representing human language descriptors. For the majority of the 6,909 languages documented by ethnologue.com, in particular the small languages, creole and pidgin languages no unambiguous format exist to properly document them. And since the semantic web is all about context for now only mainstream languages (including the most studied ancient languages) are not going to pose a problem. Milton Ponson GSM: +297 747 8280 PO Box 1154, Oranjestad Aruba, Dutch Caribbean Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide by creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide and: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. ________________________________ From: "Jordanous, Anna" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:15 PM Subject: URIs for languages Hi LOD list, I am looking for URIs to use to represent particular languages (primarily Ancient Greek, Arabic, English and Spanish). This is to represent what language a document is written in, in an RDF triple. I thought it would be obvious how to refer to the language itself, but I am struggling. I would like to use something like the ISO 639 standard for languages. To distinguish between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, I have to use the ISO-639-2 set of language codes. http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/ (The codes are grc and gre respectively) http://downlode.org/Code/RDF/ISO-639/ is an RDF representation of ISO 639 but it doesn’t include Ancient Greek as it only includes ISO-639-1 languages. As far as I see, I have the following options e.g. for Arabic Use the http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes_name.php?code_ID=22 http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes-keyword.php?SearchTerm=ara&SearchType=iso_639_2 http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2#ara This really must be simpler – what am I missing? Any comments welcomed. Thanks for your help anna --- Anna Jordanous Research Associate Centre for e-Research King's College London Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 1988
