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lingvoj

I’m just now running across lingvoj.org, a linked-data application for languages created by Bernard Vatant. lingvoj basically mints URIs for languages (using the ISO-639-1 code) and when resolved (yay HTTP) nice human and machine readable descriptions about the language are returned. So for example the URI for Chinese is:

http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/zh

If you click on that link, your browser will display some HTML that describes the Chinese language, and if a client wants “application/rdf+xml” it’ll get back a nice chunk of rdf — all via a 303 redirect as it should be.

lingvoj is interesting for a few reasons:

  • I work at the Library of Congress, who are the maintainers of iso639-2, and I know someone experimenting with a linked-data application for delivering it.
  • I know software developers at LC and elsewhere who need access to this data in a predictable and explicit machine readable format, which lends itself to being updated (re-harvesting language URIs).
  • lingvoj follows the 303 URIs forwarding to One Generic Document pattern, which is nice to see in practice. I also learned about the use of rdfs:isDefinedBy to assert (in this case) that a language is defined by the HTML representation for the language. Not sure how I missed that in the Cool URIs document before.
  • There are owl:sameAs links between lingvoj and dbpedia and opencyc, which in turn are linked data, and allow an agent to walk outwards and discover more about a language. Maybe one day lingvoj could link to our ISO693-2 codelist at LC?
  • lingvoj defines a vocabulary which includes a new OWL class Lingvo for languages, that happens to extend dcterms:LinguisticSystem.

It’s a lot o’ fun discovering this emerging, rich data-universe on the web. If you are the least bit curious take a look for yourself:

  curl --location --header "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/zh

Or better yet:

  rapper -o turtle http://lingvoj.org/lang/zh

Or if you are really adventurous grab the whole data set and put it into your triple-store-du-jour.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under semweb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “lingvoj”

  1. Kingsley Idehen Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    Ed,

    People can also explore via:
    http://demo.openlinksw.com/rdfbrowser2/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lingvoj.org%2Flang%2Fzh

    and other RDF Browsers / Linked Data Explorers :-)

    BTW - OpenID base authentication isn’t working re. this comments interface.

  2. Ed Summers Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 3:31 am

    Thanks for the links to the openlink rdfbrowser. Sometimes I think the linked data browsers actually hide the simplicity of what’s going on … which is something I’m trying to communicate. But still I imagine the browsers are good for some folks who aren’t interested in the HTTP interactions with URIs.

    I’m trying to submit this comment with my openid. So if you see this it worked for me :-)

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