[od-discuss] ISO Codes

Tue Nov 18 14:59:47 UTC 2014

Hi Gisle

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.
>

On 18 November 2014 02:55, Gisle Hannemyr <gisle at ifi.uio.no> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Depends how you are comparing the standards, length, political process,
frequency of implementation or in this case how much of the standard is
subject to copyright. OOXML tends to avoid inter-opreratbility with other
ISO standards not least ISO 8601.

>
> 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").
>

Its useful to have an opportunity to clarify one's meaning. No I do think
that ISO 3166 is more factual than ISO/IEC 29500. Indeed I am not sure that
one standard can be said to be more factual than another although of course
one standard can be said to contain many more facts than another.

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

How can anything be described as factual?

>
> I don't think the word "factual" can be used in the context of such
> vocabularies.

For better or worse copyright law, which is at issue here, distinguishes
between facts and original work, facts are not subject to copyright while
original work is subject to copyright. Therefore any facts contained in a
copyright work are not themselves subject to copyright, whatever the
copyright holder might state.

> 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.
>

The inclusion of a few non factual items in a list of facts doesn't alter
the nature of the facts.

The distinction that you make between 'indisputable geo-political facts

> about what territory is a "country"' and 'a controlled
> vocabulary that others may use for labels, taxonomies and other
> application' is not clear to me. Are you saying that one is a type of fact
> and the other is not? If so what definition of fact underlies that
> distinction? Is it Humean or Wittgensteinian?
>
> 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.

But I never suggested that OOXML was not copyright.

> There is no difference at all
> between these two (beyond your obvious personal dislike of one of them).
>

It is not clear on what you base your reading that I have an obvious
personal dislike of one of the standards. I have already pointed out a
number of ways in which they are dissimilar but my remark suggesting that
it is unlikely that anyone would want to obtain a copy of OOXML is that the
originator of the standard has not been able to fully implement it.
That returns the conversation to the original question, a successful
standard is a standard that people use. If a digital enterprise supported
country codes it would have an open API so that it would not be necessary
for developers to copy the country codes.

thanks for the conversation

--
> - gisle hannemyr [ gisle{at}hannemyr.no - http://folk.uio.no/gisle/ ]
> ========================================================================
>     "Don't follow leaders // Watch the parkin' meters" - Bob Dylan
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