Re: [geolang-comment] First proposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

John Cowan wrote:

> Lars Marius Garshol scripsit:
> 
> 
>>Basically whether the strings in question are human-oriented names or
>>labels for the subjects[1]. In my opinion these strings are clearly
>>occurrences rather than names. The country at the south tip of Africa
>>has names like 'South Africa' and 'Afrique du Sud', but not like 'ZA',
>>'ZAF', or '710'. 
>>
> 
> Fair enough, but I still feel uncomfortable with saying that the string
> "710" is an *occurrence* of the country denoted by "South Africa",
> in the same sense that http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html
> is an occurrence of the (U.S.) Declaration of Independence.
> I may be misled by the use of the term "occurrence" here, though.
> 
> OTOH, "710" does name (within a suitably restricted scope) that country,
> in the sense of being a unique label for it.  The most central sense of "name",
> namely personal name, is not a basename in an XTM sense: there are other
> John Cowans within any non-arbitrary scope (there is another within
> Reuters, e.g., and we sometimes get each other's mail).


This is precisely why in the design of the XTM 1.0 country and
language topic maps I used names rather than occurrences (which
I had considered). "710" *is* a name for a country within the
scope of the UN code base. It's not an occurrence of that country.
Now, as we all know, the language used to describe the topics and
scopes heavily influences how this all fleshes out; errors are
easy to make.

I also have difficulty with using occurrences for another reason.
Occurrences are (to my mind) the territory being mapped by a topic
map, not the map. These topic maps are themselves being used as
maps, such that "occurrences" would be what "users" populate the
maps with. [I quote those words because I think the potential uses
of these topic maps so wide as to make such characterizations a
bit misleading.] I hope you get my drift though: occurrences are
quite different than names in the topic map paradigm. They exist
across the gulf from each other.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

      If it wants to be a global power and a player in the
      Atlantic alliance, Europe has to get back into the
      business of making war. -- Newsweek Magazine, June 3, 2002