Re: [xtm-wg] New language.xtm and country.xtm proposals

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

* Murray Altheim
| 
| No, this was the crucial point. They did *not* standardize the
| languages and countries of the world, they standardized a list of
| their *names* as well as a set of codes as proxies for those
| names. Look at the name of each standard. Both ISO and IETF always
| call them "codes for the representation of languages", "Tags for the
| identification of languages," etc.

So, in other words, what the codes do is to represent or identify
languages.

Let's be a bit more specific here, so that it is easier to make sure
we are on the same page. What, in your opinion, is the subject of this
topic?

  [german
   @"http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/language.xtm#de"]

(For those who don't know it: I'm using LTM notation here to create a
topic with the subject indentifier that is the URI above.) 

In your opinion, is the subject of this topic the langauge code 'de'
or is the language German?

If it is the language code 'de' then I wonder what the PSI can
actually be used for. Can you make some examples of statements made
using the topic that would seem sensible to you?

Also, if, in the same LTM file, I were to put in the association

  spoken-in([german], [germany])

what, in your opinion, would be the assertion made by that
association?

| It's fallacious to do otherwise, and the current language and
| country topic maps do exactly the same thing, by conscious design.

I know it was by conscious design, but like Kal I am having great
problems understanding the rationale for that design. Please help me
out here and try to explain how you think your approach is the
sensible way to do it.

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Furthermore, the current version of language.xtm says that the
| language code 'de' has two names:
| 
|   'de'
|   'German'
| 
| I think it is reasonable to claim that the name of the language code
| is 'de', but to claim that the code has the name 'German' is absurd.
| There is a language, known by the names 'German', 'Deutsch', 'tysk',
| and many others, as well as by the code 'de', but the code itself has
| no name but itself.
 
* Murray Altheim
|
| This is either a red herring or you've not read the topic map very well.
| The 'de' string is scoped by being an alpha-2 code. The 'German' string
| is scoped by "English" meaning it's an identifier for anything German
| when you're speaking English. Let's be clear here.

The 'de' string is a characteristic of a topic, which has some
subject. If the subject is the language 'German', then that is an
instance of the topic 'language', and not 'language-code', right?

To me 'de-the-language-code' and 'german-the-language' are two
different subjects, which must be represented by different topics.  It
follows that the characteristics of the one cannot be assigned to the
other. 

In other words, the string 'German' is the name of a language, not of
a language code. The name of the language code is 'de', and the code
can have no other name.

This is how I think about this. Obviously, your thinking differs, but
I haven't yet comprehended how. 
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| In short, I can't see how these topic maps can be of any use to anyone
| unless the topics in them are instances of 'country' and 'language',
| respectively. Surely that must be the point of the whole exercise?
 
* Murray Altheim
|
| Your argument holds no water; ISO and IETF have been doing precisely
| the same thing as these topic maps for many years.

Well, have they? Here is a quote from RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), section 14.4:

  For example,        

    Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7    

  would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept British English and
  other types of English."

Now, if this doesn't mean that the IETF uses the language code 'da' to
mean the language Danish I don't know what it means.

--Lars M.


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