On multilingualism

 

As multilingualism came up, I agree with Carlos that it doesn’t fit in the BP on reusing standard terms.

 

We may need to say something about it in Best Practice 2: Provide metadata for both humans and machines.

That BP defines the test “Check that a human user can easily read the metadata associated with a dataset”. Not so sure about “easily” here – that depends on how well the human user understands the things that the dataset represents – but we do need to say something about language. I would argue that metadata in Chinese is very appropriate for a dataset that is published in China, although there are some six billion people who would not be able to read it easily or even at all.

 

In addition, we may want to say that data publishers SHOULD/MAY (?) provide metadata in multiple languages to make data discoverable and usable for users that don’t speak the language of the publisher’s locale.

 

Makx.

 

Good to talk about multilingualism, but not necessarily in a BP about reusing standard terms, although happy to keep that part anyway (in a more neutral way as that's something you can easily do with other technologies as well).