For English and Spanish, the ISO codes should work well. Depending on the
level of granularity you require for Arabic, the codes provided might not
be enough.
Next week, we well release Glottolog/Langdoc[1], which will provide
information about 104k 'languoids' (languages, dialects, families) from
over 100 classifications as Linked Data, with 21k languoids in the primary
tree 'MPI Composite 2011'.
I realise that for this particular use case ISO 639-2/3 would probably be
enough; the focus of Glottolog/Langdoc is more on severely underdescribed
languages, which are by definition not used very often for 'language a
document is written in'
Best wishes
Sebastian
[1] http://glottolog.livingsources.org un&pw:glottolog, might sporadically
be offline until official release
On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:15:44 +0100, Jordanous, Anna
<[email protected]> wrote:
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
