How to get a semantic list of all spoken languages in the world
22 Feb 2011First stop, grab and parse the list from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes.
Getting language meta data by url dereferencing
This is the easiest method but has less control over the data that is returned (by default all data about the language is returned). Simply replace the [language_name] part of the following url with the value in “Language Name” (NOTE: it is case sensitive so the Language Name must be in capital case):
So for Aramaic the url would be:
For Khmer the url would be:
Getting a subset of data
Let’s say we want a little more control and therefore need only a subset of the data available. In this case we can turn to the SPARQL endpoint available at http://dbpedia.org/sparql. Copy and paste the following example to get name, abstract, depiction, comment and label data for English Language:
Simply change ?uri dbprop:name "English"@en;
to the (English) name of the language that you want to search for e.g. ?uri dbprop:name "French"@en;
will return the dbpedia data fields related to the French Language.
Resources
- SPARQL: http://sparql.org/
- Linked Data: http://linkeddata.org/