Re: [geolang-comment] Re: [tm-pubsubj-comment] Baltimore minutes

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Mary Nishikawa scripsit:

> >Exact. The process that we had in PubSubj was to look at GeoLang proposal 
> >vs what PubSubj
> >general recommendations or requirements are so far and will be. What was 
> >agreed on was
> >that URLs should carry some semantics to human users, and in that spirit, 
> >the alpha code
> >was considered better than the numeric one. OTOH I remember that in 
> >Montréal, Lars Marius
> >among others stressed the fact that too much semantics in URLs was not 
> >that a good idea,
> >leading to the opposite conclusion. This is indeed something to fix in 
> >terms of process.

Process aside, it turns out that the ISO 3166 registration authority
doesn't understand the need for stability properly (by our standards).
On request of the Romanian government, ISO just changed the code
for Romania from ROM to something else (I forget what), with no notice,
no deprecation plan, just boom and it was done.

The numeric codes are assiged by the U.N. statistical office, and are
guaranteed at least as stable as the countries themselves (they only
change when countries vanish or appear).  That is why Geolang chose to
use them.

In addition, the U.N. assigns non-overlapping 3-digit numerics for the
large-scale regions of the earth (e.g. the whole world, the Americas,
Central America, Asia, East Asia) which are also a work item for Geolang.

-- 
Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN    John Cowan
in any language.  --Allen Brown                 jcowan@reutershealth.com