downlode.org > Code > RDF Vocabularies and Representations > ISO 639

ISO 639 RDF Representation

Latest version:

http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/

This version:

http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/2005-12-23.html

Previous version:

http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/2005-12-13.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.

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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/languages#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, see the full definitions file.

Changes since last version

At the suggestion of Nicolas Kessner, to avoid validation issues and generally make things simpler, the definitions have been moved out of the source of this page into a separate file. This accordingly means that URIs for country definitions have changed from (for example) http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/#en to http://downlode.org/rdf/iso-639/languages#en. The URIs should not change again, unless persistent URIs are acquired; in which case the old URIs will be redirected accordingly and will not break.

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.

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