Re: [web-annotation] exactly 0 or 1 language(s)

Thanks @r12a for writing all this down. And, at the moment, I am torn.

* On the one hand, I think that the situation would become indeed much
 clearer if a body (more exactly, in our terminology, a Specific 
Resource or a Textual Body describing a body) would indeed use 0 or 
one `language` tag. In case the use case is to have different body 
resources out there that are conceptually equivalent but are in 
different languages, then we can use Choice or some of the (newly 
re-established) composites, to separate them from one another. This 
makes the model clean, and also covers the problems @r12a has.

* On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that, out there, there 
are messy resources that we want to annotate; @gsergiu has clearly 
indicated that he is facing such a situation. Texts may be out there 
that _do_ mix languages (whether we like it or not), and the only way 
of conveying this information in an annotation is to allow for more 
than one languages.

I believe the way forward is to say something like: "an annotation 
SHOULD have zero or one language terms, and MAY have more than 1 in 
exceptional cases." @gsergiu's use case may be quoted in an informal 
note where the MAY comes into effect, but we should also note that 
implementations/users should really try to use one language, because 
otherwise problems may occur.

And stop there...


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Received on Monday, 23 May 2016 16:27:54 UTC