1. AIMS
Is ISO 639 enough for a multilingual
thesaurus?
The AGROVOC case
Caterina Caracciolo, Gudrun Johannsen, Lavanya Kiran,
Johannes Keizer
Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN
AOS 2012
Sept 4. 2012 - Kuching (MY)

2. Background
• AGROVOC is published in 21 languages + other
under development
• Multilinguality has always been an issue
• Since the beginning, multilinguality was
interpreted as “translation”:
– One hierarchy of terms (one structure),
translations in various languages
• This organization remained with the move
from a term-centered to a concept-centered
resource
9/19/2012 2

3. AGROVOC as object-centered
resource…
• Being mainly a resource for document
indexing in the area of agriculture, it contains
large amount of words referring to plants,
animals, food in general
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4. # of concepts below top concepts
organism
substances
entities
phenomena
activities
products
methods
properties
features
objects
resources
subjects
systems
locations Series1
groups
measures
state
stages
technology
processes
factors
time
events
site
strategies
9/19/2012 4
0 5000 10000 15000 20000 25000

5. Differentiating languages
• Salmon (en)
• Salmón (es)
• лососи (ru)
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6. But distribution of languages may
be wide…
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7. … and names of food tend to vary…
Aguacate
Palta
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8. … and names of food tend to vary…
Ataco morado,
sangorache,
sergorache,
hawarcha
Achis,
Coyos (Cajamarca),
Achita (Ayacucho),
Coime, coimi,
Kiwicha (Cusco)
cuimi, millmi
9/19/2012 8

9. Not only food names vary
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10. Requirements for rendering
multilinguality in AGROVOC
1. Unambiguously express the geographic area
where a given word is used
– specification of the area of use of a given word
should be optional.
2. No limitations on the type of area allowed
– Countries, groups of countries, geographical or
administrative regions should be equally available
for specification.
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 10

11. AGROVOC as a SKOS resource
• skos:Concept is to indicate a group of words in
various languages, to be considered translations of
one another
• URI are kept “abstract” to emphasize independence
of the concept from language
– E.g. http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_12332
• The words grouped are then labels of the given
concept
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12. SKOS properties to express terms
• skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel
– take plain literals as values
– and an optional language tag expressed by XML
attribute xml:lang
• skosxl:prefLabel, skosxl:altLabel
– Take entities with URIs, so extra infomation be
attached to labels
9/19/2012 12

13. AGROVOC uses ISO 639 2 digits
to tag languages in xml:lang
• ISO 639 provides codes for languages
independently of
– the country where they are spoken:
• Spanish, Basque (same country, both official languages)
• Dutch, Flamish (different country, similar enough
languages…)
– And their status: French and Breton (same
country, Breton has no status)
• Only one code for English, Spanish…
• Limitations shown from previous examples
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 13

14. Multilinguality
ISO 639
Language
codes
9/19/2012 14

15. Is ISO 639 3 digits an option?
• More languages are included
– More contemporary languages
• Bemba language
– “Old” languages (no longer spoken)
• Old French (842ca-1400)
– Groups of languages
• Cuacasian languages
– Artificial languages
• Same approach as the 2 digit version
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 15

16. Is IETF an option?
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• IETF 5646 Tags for identifying languages
– Basis is ISO for languages (639)
– Subtags from ISO for countries (3166), ISO for
scripts (15924)
• Examples:
– tr-CY = Turkish from Cyprus
– zh-Hant-HK = Chinese in traditional Chinese script
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 16

17. Is a relational approach an option?
• Keep tagging approach to mark the language
– Use ISO 639 or IETF
• And introduce a relational notion of “where a
given word is used”
• Link together a concept representing a
geographic area, and the object to name
– E.g., Kiwicha isNameUsedInRegion Cusco
• Aim at “standard” relations…
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 17

18. Conclusions?
• This is work in progress
• We continue working out use cases, especially
from Spanish and Portuguese
• Assess alternatives
9/19/2012 KISAF, Rome 18