[od-discuss] ISO Codes

Wed Nov 19 19:54:54 UTC 2014

Hi,

I wonder when we talk about factual - I understand a country as factual - Canada - but a country code (eg. CA)  is added value by ISO. This to me could be subject to copyright.  Thus the question is whether myself using this value added intelligence is subject to ISO copyright whether it by API or simply manually embedding them into my marked up IATI record?

Cheers,
Michael

---
Michael Roberts
Open Data Technical Manager
+1 514 802 9528
@michaeloroberts | michaelr at webfoundation.org <mailto:michaelr at webfoundation.org>
World Wide Web Foundation | 1110 Vermont Ave NW, Suite 500, Washington DC, 20005, USA | www.webfoundation.org <http://www.webfoundation.org/> | Twitter: @webfoundation

> On Nov 18, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Andrew Rens <andrewrens at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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://hannemyr.no/> - http://folk.uio.no/gisle/ <http://folk.uio.no/gisle/> ]
> ========================================================================
>     "Don't follow leaders // Watch the parkin' meters" - Bob Dylan
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