Encoding changing country codes for the Semantic Web with ISO 3166 and SKOS

Encoding changing country codes for the Semantic Web with ISO 3166 and SKOS Jakob Voß Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG), Platz der G¨ottinger Sieben 1, 37073 G¨ottingen, Germany. jakob.voss@gbv.de Summary. This paper shows how authority files can be encoded for the Semantic Web with the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). In particular the application of SKOS for encoding the structure, management, and utilization of country codes as defined in ISO 3166 is demonstrated. The proposed encoding gives a use case for SKOS that includes features that have only been discussed little so far, such as multiple notations, nested concept schemes, changes by versioning. 1 Introduction 1.1 Semantic Web The Semantic Web is a vision to extend the World Wide Web to a universal, de- centralised information space. To join in, information has to be expressed with the Resources Description Framework (RDF) in form of statements about resources. All resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as defined in RFC 3986 [1]. URIs can identify documents, but also real-world objects and ab- stract concepts. In library and information science controlled vocabularies are used to uniformly identify objects — also across different databases. An example of such controlled vocabulary is ISO 3166 [2] that defines codes and names to identify coun- tries and their subdivisions. To use ISO 3166 in Semantic Web applications for referring to countries, an encoding in RDF is needed. The encoding should include explicit relations between codes in ISO 3166 and define a way how to deal with changes. It is shown how the Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems (SKOS) can be used to encode ISO 3166, and which parts of it need to be redefined to do so. Examples of RDF in this paper are given in Notation 3 (N3) [3]. 1.2 ISO 3166 and other systems of country codes Country codes are short codes that represent countries and dependent areas. The most common code for general applications is ISO 3166, but there are many other country codes for special uses. Country codes are managed by an agency that de- fines a set of countries, with code, name and partly additional information. Examples arXiv:0801.3908v1 [cs.IR] 25 Jan 2008 2 Jakob Voß of relevant systems of country codes beside ISO 3166 include codes that are used by the US government as defined by the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), codes of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), codes of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and numerical country calling codes assigned by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Some country codes occur as part of more general coding systems, for instance in the geographical table of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) that is used as a universal library classifica- tion. Other systems also identify groups of countries such as the group identifiers of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN). More country code systems are listed in the English Wikipedia [4]. The best public resource on country codes on the Web is Statoids [5] that includes references and a history of updated codes for many country subdivisions. GeoNames [6] is an open, free-content geographical database that also contains countries and subdivisions. In contrast to ISO 3166 (which GeoN- ames partly refers to) GeoNames already uses URIs and SKOS to publish its content, but changes are rather uncontrolled because the database can be edited by anyone. Examples of agencies that not define codes but names of countries and subdivisions are the Board on Geographic Names (BGN) in the United States and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (StAGN) in Germany. 1.3 ISO 3166 ISO 3166 is an international standard for coding the names of countries and its subdivisions. It consists of three parts. ISO 3166-1 (first published in 1974) defines two letter codes, three letter codes and three digit numeric codes for countries and dependent areas together with their names in English and French. The standard is widely refered to by other standards. For instance ISO 3166-2 is used for most of the country code top-level domains as defined by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the ICANN Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO). ISO 3166-2 (first published 1998) builds on ISO 3166-1 and defines codes for country subdivisions. Figure 1 shows the relations between ISO 3166, ISO 3166-1, and ISO 3166-2. ISO 3166-3 defines four letter codes for countries that merged, split up or changed the main part of their name and their two letter ISO 3166-1 codes since 1974. ISO 3166 is continuously updated via newsletters that are published by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency.1 In November 2006 a second edition of ISO 3166-1 was published [2]. It contains a consolidation all changes to the lists of ISO 3166- 1:1997, published in the ISO 3166 Newsletter up to V-12. Meanwhile this edition has been corrected by a technical corrigendum that was published in July 2007 [7]. 1.4 SKOS SKOS

…(Full text truncated)…

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.