RE: I18n and Linked Data - an important (but fixable) omission?

I notice that Wikipedia uses IRIs, at least in their non-English domains, but when I try to copy/paste an example into this message it gets URL-encoded:

 

http://cv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%94%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%B9%D0%BD

 

Oddly enough, if I hack the Firefox address bar to change cv.wikipedia.org/wiki to dbpedia.org/resource and then copy/paste again it doesn't get URL-encoded:

 

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Остин_Джейн

 

Weird.

 

Jeff

 

From: public-xg-lld-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-lld-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jodi Schneider
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 1:08 PM
To: Tom Baker
Cc: Andrew Cunningham; Karen Coyle; Felix Sasaki; duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp; Antoine Isaac; public-xg-lld; public-i18n-core@w3.org
Subject: Re: I18n and Linked Data - an important (but fixable) omission?

 

Tom,

 

I'm going through the entire report now. When I first read your mail about the IRI that location seemed fine -- and I really like the sentence.

 

However in the context of defining Linked Data in the Scope section, it seems out of place to me:

 

Linked Data. "Linked Data" (LD) refers to data published in accordance with principles <http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html>  designed to facilitate linkages among datasets, element sets, and value vocabularies. Linked Data uses (Web) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as globally unique identifiers for any kind of resources -- analogously to the library world's identifiers for authority control -- and provides data using standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF). (While this report follows common practice in emphasizing URIs, readers should note the increasing role of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987>  as multilingual Web addresses <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/>  that support non-Latin scripts.) Linked Data defines relationships between things -- relationships that can be used for navigating between, or integrating, information from multiple sources.

 

This complicates the section on Linked Data -- one of the key places I think we need to simplify. So I would propose reverting that change, so that this paragraph focuses only on Linked Data -- the concept it is defining.

 

Then, if we do feel the need to cover URIs in the Scope section, I'd rather that we gave it its own line (similar to how we define "libraries"). Alternately we might want to put it in the "Available Technologies" Appendix section of the report: We have considerably simplified a number of issues in the main report.

 

While I'm not sure that the *term* "IRI" is that much harder to understand than "URI" (which is different from the "URL" which is in common practice), you make a good point that URIs, rather than IRIs, are currently emphasized in Linked Data. It would be helpful to know whether, for instance, the National Diet Library is currently using IRIs for Linked Data.

 

-Jodi

 

 

On 9 Sep 2011, at 17:56, Tom Baker wrote:





Hi Andrew,

On Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 12:36:02PM +1000, Andrew Cunningham wrote:



Being in both Library and i18n camps, I'd stress the important of

	referencing IRIs.


I see your point but don't see an easy way of doing this without changing the
whole emphasis in the report on "URIs" (e.g., a global search and replace
"s/URIs/IRIs/"?).  Emphasizing IRIs would put us out of synch with the
five-star coffee cup message of Linked Data generally.  Making the reference
prominently in the Scope section will get readers' attention.  If the Linked
Data message is wrong to emphasize URIs (and not IRIs) _generally_, then maybe
we need a revised coffee cup message...

Does that make sense?

Tom

[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

-- 
Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>