RE: WebOnt Requirements - I18N

Jim:
> >R11. Internationalization
>
> I think this is out of scope unless very focused on ontology-specific
> issues of internationalization - W3C has other folks
> w/internationalization as a specific focus and we don't want to stray
> into their area.

With respect, the I18N-wg will disagree.

The charmod wd will probably come to rec before we do, and we will be bound
by the constraints that charmod places on W3C recommendations.

http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod

I do not believe these will be heavy, but we will need to give some account
of i18n and the webont language. In fact, a quick scan suggests that all the
current suggestions for requirements for specificiations (marked in S) are
ones that should be met at a lower layer (e.g. XML or RDF).


The core issue for webont and I18N, as I see it at the moment, is that in an
ontology that has a property named in american english "color", there is no
way currently in any of the lower layers (XML, RDF) to express that this is
american english, and that the british english is "colour", and the italian
"colore". This is because the property names are the fragment IDs of URI
references, and there is no way in the current stack of attaching a language
tag to URIs, URI references or fragment IDs.

I note that in some cases where the same word means different things in
different languages (e.g. "shopping" in English & Italian) this could become
a significant problem.

We may well need to have a fairly significant effort to explain how
ontologies can be internationalised.

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2001 07:47:50 UTC