Linking to Linguistic Data Categories in ISOcat

ISO Technical Committee 37, Terminology and other language and content resources established an ISO 12620:2009 based Data Category Registry (DCR), called ISOcat (see http://www.isocat.org), to foster semantic interoperability of linguistic resources. This registry follows a grass roots approach, which means that any linguist can add the data categories (s)he needs. Standardized subsets of these data categories are created by a standardization procedure involving groups of international experts who are members of various Thematic Domain Groups (TDGs) and of the DCR Board. However, the goal of improving semantic interoperability can only be met if the data categories are reused by a wide variety of linguistic resource types. A resource indicates its usage of data categories by linking to them. ISO 12620:2009 specifies a small DC Reference XML vocabulary to annotate XML documents with links to data categories. The link is established by an URI, which servers as the Persistent IDentifier (PID) of a data category. Any XML document can now refer to data categories to explicate the semantics of elements, attributes and values. This paper discusses the efforts to mimic the same approach for RDF-based resources. It also introduces the RDF quad store based Relation Registry RELcat, which enables ontological relationships between data categories not supported by ISOcat and thus adds an extra level of linguistic knowledge.