[od-discuss] ISO Codes

Tue Nov 18 07:55:29 UTC 2014

On 2014-11-17 23:36, Andrew Rens wrote:
> There is a vast difference between a standard such as a compilation of
> currency codes and a standard like Office "Open" XML which is not factual.

I think this statement is confusing.  There is no "vast difference"
here.  Office Open XML (aka. ISO/IEC 29500) is just like /any other/
ISO standard.

Your statement seems to be based upon the assumption that ISO/IEC 29500
is not "factual" (unlike other ISO standards such as ISO 3166, which
you seem to think is "factual").

I don't get this: How can strings that constitute is a man-made
controlled vocabulary be said to be "factual"?

I don't think the word "factual" can be used in the context of such
vocabularies.  But if you insist, I would like to point out that some
of the "countries" listed in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 is not - in fact -
countries.  One obvious example is "BV" (Bouvet Island), which
I don't think /anybody/ believe is a real country (there are no people
there, just penguins). A more controversial example is "PL" (State of
Palestine), whose "countryness" seems to depend on the observer's
personal opinion about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But whether a particular standard is "factual" is moot.  The purpose
of ISO 3166 is /not/ to standardize indisputable geo-political facts
about what territory is a "country", but to provide a controlled
vocabulary that others may use for labels, taxonomies and other
application where such a vocabulary shall be useful.

As for copyright protection: the full, verbatim text of ISO/IEC 29500
is (just like ISO 3166) protected by copyright, while the individual
(markup) strings it contains are not.  There is no difference at all
between these two (beyond your obvious personal dislike of one of them).
-- 
- gisle hannemyr [ gisle{at}hannemyr.no - http://folk.uio.no/gisle/ ]
========================================================================
    "Don't follow leaders // Watch the parkin' meters" - Bob Dylan