I18N issues an OWL2

Hi

I earlier brought your attention in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2008JanMar/0001

to an issue being considered by the OWL WG concerning the ability to 
group natural language literals via lang tags.

http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/tracker/issues/71
(based on
Jeremy J. Carroll, Addison Phillips: Multilingual RDF and OWL. ESWC 
2005: 108-122)

While this issue is currently still open and no formal decisions have 
been made, I have been asked to update you as to our progress.

1) There is informal consensus to give this a go!
2) There is informal consensus to not include XMLLiterals (such as 
embedded XHTML within OWL) in the scope of the task
3) The most likely approach will be to extend the derived datatype 
mechanisms (copied more or less from XML Schema) to apply to such 
natural language literals (a string paired with a lang tag).

As a result of (3) there is likely to be regex matching against the 
langtag, as opposed to RFC 4647 language ranges. I believe that regex 
matching is more powerful, so that RFC 4647 could be supported by 
software compliant with the spec being written, but explicit support for 
RFC 4647 is currently not envisaged.

In my judgement, this will be a significant step forward, and while the 
whole I18N shopping list in this area is too long to carry consensus, I 
would suggest that a 'cup half full' response would be appropriate in 
this case.

Also, I will be leaving HP next week, and will no longer be 
participating in the OWL WG.

Jeremy

OWL Issue tracker: ACTION-144

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2008 10:58:24 UTC