Francis
> Hang on! What is the authority that says that these country codes are
> synonymous? ISO 3166!
The ISO 3166 Maintenance Authority, which publishes tables that show both
entries side by side. The problem is how to change these HTML (or is it PDF,
I can't remember) tables into something that we can use for datatyping.
>There might be a case for the kind of datatype
> definition that you're describing, but it surely should NEVER be used to
> define equivalences in someone else's value-space.
This was the problem I was bringing up originally: how can users identify
relevant subsets of values in someone elses namespace. This was why I
namespaced the two ISO3166 lists, as ISO3166:short and ISO3166:long.
> It seems to me that the fact that "KO" and "KOR" are codes for the same
> geopolitical entity must be entirely determined by ISO 3166 and statements
> to this effect elsewhere should always defer to ISO 3166. ISO in their
> wisdom (or folly) may at some future date decide that "KO" and "KOR" are
NOT
> the same, in which case you might create an international incident by
> continuing to suggest that they were!
In fact the namespace needs to point to a particular version date for the
list (e.g. ISO3166-2002) to be unambiguous, but as the Maintentance
Authority has already issued three amendments this year (covering things
like the revised status East Timor and Afghanistan, not to mention new
provinces in Uzbechistan) that becomes problematical. The whole problem of
versions and dates of enumeration list references is one that we need to
tackle somehow.
> You may still feel that there needs to be a mechanism that makes this
> technically possible, even if it would state somewhere that defining
> equivalences between values in value-spaces defined by someone else are
> deprecated.
>
> To my mind schemas should stick to defining constraints and not make
> value-judgements by defining equivalences.
Agreed, but the problem is that the constraint we want has to be expressed
at present as "use this subset of that enumerated list maintained by the ISO
3166 Maintenance Authority in their HTML/PDF files". Until we get them to
maintain DSDL conformant enumeration lists we can't start to do anything :-(
Martin
-- DSDL members discussion list To unsubscribe, please send a message with the command "unsubscribe" to dsdl-discuss-request@dsdl.org (mailto:dsdl-discuss-request@dsdl.org?Subject=unsubscribe)Received on Fri Jun 21 11:28:45 2002
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