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

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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'.

* John Cowan
| 
| 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.

I think you are. XTM 1.0 says occurrences are

  "An occurrence is any information that is specified as being
  relevant to a given subject."

while the SAM is slightly more formal and says

  "An occurrence is a relationship between an information resource and
  a subject. The precise nature of this relationship is described by
  the occurrence type, a subject which is attached to the
  occurrence. Occurrences are generally used to attach information
  resources to the subjects they are relevant to."

and by both of these definitions "710" is an occurrence of South
Africa, given that it is an information resource relevant to the
country South Africa.
 
| OTOH, "710" does name (within a suitably restricted scope) that
| country, in the sense of being a unique label for it.  

Absolutely, but not a human-readable one. It was always the intention
that base names be readable (at least that's my impression of the
intentions of the "fathers"), even when used as unique identifiers
within namespaces (which is what TNC base names are).

| 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).

That has always been my criticism of the TNC: that coming up with
reasonable scopes that make it work as intended is quite often not
possible at all.

However, at the Montréal meeting we decided to make the TNC optional
(each base name can indicate whether or not the TNC applies to it), so
this is no longer a problem. Otherwise I would have had to scope all
names by their respective source standards in the XTM files to avoid
problems with the TNC.

See

<URL: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/topic_complete.jsp?tm=tm-standards.xtm&id=topic-naming-constraint >

for more information. I hope to get the link to N0331 to work within
24 hours or so.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >