Re: [legaldocml] Re: [akomantoso-xml] FRBRcountry

Hi Fabio,

I did see that there are ISO 3166 codes for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland so it looks like we're covered in that regard.

However, as well as potentially needing the Akoma Ntoso schema to allow multiple codes to cover combinations of these four jurisdictions, we also need to be able to define different jurisdictions for different sections of an Act. As far as I can tell you can currently only assign one country code to the whole document when, in the case of the UK, you actually have the need to assign multiple and differing jurisdictions separately at Part, Chapter, Section, Paragraph etc level. So we'd need jurisdiction metadata available at every level if that isn't currently available in the schema.


cheers

Mark

ps The difference between GB and UK is that Great Britain refers to the island made up of England, Wales and Scotland (so not including Northern Ireland) while the United Kingdom refers to the country that also includes Northern Ireland.


-----Original Message-----
From: Fabio Vitali [mailto:] 
Sent: 14 November 2012 17:23
To: Jones, Mark (LNG-LON)
Cc: Ashok Hariharan; ; 
Subject: Re: [legaldocml] Re: [akomantoso-xml] FRBRcountry

Dear Mark, 

wow, this is though. Values for element FRBRcountry have three important constraints, and I hope we can find a way to satisfy all three at the same time: 

1) Values must be taken from the ISO 3166 (alpha-2) country codes, when existing (which is difficult in and by itself, as ISO 3166 only maps countries that existed from 1974 onward, and if we have a piece of legislation still enacted but coming from a country that stopped existing before 1974, we have problems). 
2) Values must be short enough so as to be re-usable in the Work URIs as their first fragment 
3) They must, you know, identify the country and/or jurisdiction of the document. 

ISO 3166 is by no means complete. It only lists countries existing in 1974 and onward (so when we'll be dealing with past countries, we will have to invent something). ISO 3166-2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2 ) has most sub-country jurisdictions (US states, Italian regions and provinces, German Ländern, etc.). 

For UK ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GB ), we have codes the four main countries (actually, two separate codes for Welsh, in English and Welsh), plus "England: 27 two-tier counties, 32 London boroughs, 36 metropolitan districts, 55 unitary authorities, 1 city corporation. Northern Ireland: 26 districts, Scotland: 32 council areas, Wales: 22 unitary authorities". We also have codes for England and Wales, Great Britain and United Kingdom (the difference between the latter two somehow escapes me, but anyhow). 

To summarize, my opinion is this: 

1) if we have an appropriate code in ISO 3166-1 or ISO 3166-2, we should use it. 
2) If we do not have an appropriate code, we should invent one with a special syntax
3) If we need multiple codes, currently the standard does not allow multiple FRBRCountry. If the need really exist, we should modify the standard. 

Hope this clarifies. 

Ciao

Fabio

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On 14/nov/2012, at 15.13, Jones, Mark (LNG-LON) wrote: