RFC 3066bis and the Semantic Web

Dear SW Best Practices and Deployment WG,

We understand that at your face-to-face meeting you will be considering:
[[
Review of TF list:
- new activities
]]

This message is to suggest new work that you might consider taking up later in the year. We'd like to suggest you consider formalizing in OWL the ontology of language identification used in the language tags in RFC 3066bis, [1] and its sister document on language tag matching and ranges [2]

RFC 3066bis is entering the final stages of the IETF standardization process, and we hope for approval in the 3-6 month time scale. RFC 3066bis formalizes the generative use of subtags to indicate different language features of a text string.

For instance, the RDF literal:
"Semantic Web Best Practices"@en-latn-US
  indicates that the string is:
+ in english (primary tag "en")
+ in latin script (first subtag "latn")
+ in the US geographic variation (second subtag "US")

An approach to linking RFC 3066bis and OWL, taken by Jeremy Carroll and myself [3], is to introduce classes of literals corresponding to each language tag and to represent the relationships between the classes using OWL class expressions and property restrictions.

Related issues considered in [3] include:
+ language tags within rdf:XMLLiterals
+ grandfathered (deprecated) language tags from RFC 3066 and RFC 1766 
+ including language ranges such as "*-latn-*" in the ontology (essentially the topic of [2])

We encourage the SWBPD to consider work in this area; such work is probably best started after the approval of RFC 3066bis by the IETF. If you would like more information on these efforts, please contact our working group.

Best Regards,

Addison


Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect, Quest Software
http://www.quest.com


Chair, Internationalization Core Working Group
http://www.w3.org/International


Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture. 

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-phillips-langtags-10.txt

See also: http://www.inter-locale.com/ID/draft-phillips-langtags-10.html


[2] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-phillips-langmatching-00.txt

See also: http://www.inter-locale.com/ID/draft-phillips-langmatching-00.html


[3] http://www.inter-locale.com/whitepaper/iswc2004.pdf

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2005 13:45:54 UTC