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

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

Steve Pepper wrote:

> Hi Murray,
> 
> Lars Marius is going to be out of email contact for a few days, so I'd
> like to clear up a couple of points in his absence.
> 
> At 14:23 30/08/02 +0100, Murray Altheim wrote:
>  >I'm curious as to how (apart from any perceived mistakes in naming
>  >the typing topics) the approach you are taking is different from the
>  >one taken in the language.xtm topic map in the XTM 1.0 Specification?
> 
> 1) the subject indicators will be in X-HTML, not XTM
> 2) the subjects they cover will be languages and countries, not
>     language codes and country codes
> 3) numeric codes will be used for country PSIs, not alpha codes
> 4) for languages, 3-letter codes will be included
> 5) for countries, numeric codes will be included
> 6) French names will be included for both
> 7) published subject identifiers will be given explicitly, not
>     left to be inferred
> 
> There may be some other differences as well. Other than that, the
> same basic approach *is* being followed.

[...]
> Rest assured: No-one wants to reinterpret, change, or modify anything
> that is in 639. I hope that is absolutely clear now.


Understood. Thanks very much for the clarification, Steve. This
makes good sense to me. I don't see much to disagree with, and
would probably side with the "warts and all" issue you mention.

While I realize you probably consider the XHTML, XTM and RDF
files as separate entities, it seems like one of them could be
used to generate the other two (eg., using perhaps XSLT), saving
maintenance and potential errors.

Murray

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