ISO 639 RDF Representation
- Latest version:
- http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/
- This version:
- http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/2005-12-13.html
- Previous version:
- http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/2005-12-03.html
- Author:
- Earle Martin
Copyright © 2005 Earle Martin.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons License. This copyright applies to the ISO 639 RDF Representation documentation
and does not apply to the ISO 639 RDF Representation data formats, vocabulary terms, or
technology. Regarding underlying technology, the ISO 639 RDF Representation relies heavily on
W3C's
RDF
technology, an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.
Abstract
This resource acts as a simple representation of the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 definitions of language names.
Usage
Following is an example of a simple RDF document referencing the English language.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf = "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:foo = "http://example.com/foo#" > <foo:Thing> <foo:name>A Thing</foo:name> <foo:language rdf:resource="http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/#en" /> </foo:Thing> </rdf:RDF>
Note the URI pointing to the fragment of the schema that represents English. The language IDs should be referred to in lower-case (in this case, "en"); this is as recommended by the ISO 639 specification.
The list of languages is defined using a simple RDF
schema. It has one class, Language, whose properties are:
name- The ISO 639 name of the language, in English or French.
alpha2- The language's ISO 639-1 (two-letter alphabetic) identifier.
alpha3- The language's ISO 639-2 (three-letter alphabetic) identifier.
Here is an example block from the vocabulary, describing the English language.
<Language rdf:ID="en"> <name xml:lang="en">English</name> <name xml:lang="fr">anglais</name> <alpha2>en</alpha2> <alpha3>eng</alpha3> </Language>
To see the full list, view the source of this page.
Changes since last version
At the suggestion of Leandro Mariano
López, the name_en and name_fr properties were merged into a single name property, with the language indicated instead
with an xml:lang attribute.
See also
Nearby: ISO 3166 RDF Representation.
For a Perl utility to determine associations between ISO 639-1 and 639-2 language codes and ISO 3166 country codes, see Locale::Object.
Acknowledgements
Parts of the layout of this document and the licensing information were adapted from the FOAF Vocabulary Specification by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller.