Multilingual labels in a w3.org/ns vocabulary

Dear all,

As Marios and Boris know, because they've been directly involved, the 
GLD WG is about to update the namespace file [1] for one of its 
vocabularies [2]. Within the next day or so it will be available with 
labels and comments in en, fr, el and es. Labels will also be available 
in Arabic.

Once it's in place I plan to write a blog post about it and generally 
make a fuss about a W3C vocab being available in more languages and how 
we'd like to see this extended. Currently only ORG 
(http://www.w3.org/ns/org.ttl) has multilingual labels - namely English 
and French.

What I want to then find out is whether this is actually helpful or not? 
In theory of course it's good that a vocab's labels will be 
multilingual, but what might the practical impact be? Moreover... how 
the heck can we know?

A question arises about the maintainability. The people who have 
provided the translated labels are people we trust implicitly. But I'd 
really like to say to the world "if you would like to provide 
translations in another language, please do and I'll add it." Safe? 
Wise? Laying W3C open to abuse?

I'd be interested in this group's comments

Thank you

Phil
(Embarrassed to be monoglot).


[1] http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat.ttl
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/

-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Monday, 23 September 2013 13:48:15 UTC