RE: I18N issues an OWL2

Before you get too far down that track, the main problem with this approach might be that language tags are composed of registered subtags. There are several hundreds (actually, more like several thousands) of language subtags, dozens of script subtags, several hundred countries/regions, and many variants--not to mention private use and so forth. As long as a type hierarchy is not enumerated in advance, this could work.

> I imagine RDF core considered this option.  I'm curious why they
> didn't take it.   I'll ping a few people.

I'm pretty sure that they considered it, since this was originally proposed to them by Jeremy Carroll, based on some work we did in 2003/2004. I think the main problem is that it isn't exactly xsd:language.

It would be very useful to read RFC 4647 (Matching Language Tags) to understand my previous comments. I can provide pointers to how the hierarchical model of language tags work as well, although you'd do worse than to look at www.langtag.net for some pointers (such as the 4646 regular expression syntax).

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 4:50 PM
> To: Axel Polleres
> Cc: Phillips, Addison; Jie Bao; public-owl-wg@w3.org; public-i18n-
> core-comments@w3.org; public-rif-comments@w3.org
> Subject: Re: I18N issues an OWL2
>
>
> > A probably more feasible solution would be to do a real type
> hierarchy,
> > for language tags and - instead of a datatype
> > owl:internationalizedString or rif:text which has pairs of
> strings and
> > language tags as lexical space - define separate datatypes and
> > (subtypes) for each lang-tag, ie.
> >
> > use:
> >
> > message("Hello"^^lang:en-US)
> >
> > where e.g. lang:en-US is a subtype of lang:en, i.e.
> > that would also imply
> >
> > message("Hello"^^lang:en)
> >
> > (just as xsd:integer is a subtype of xsd:decimal in the
> > XML Schema type hierarchy, see
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-datatypes)
> >
> > Anything wrong with that? To me this seems much cleaner than this
> > fiddling around with pairs of strings and lang-tags.
>
> I like it.    I don't see any problem with it (so far), and I agree
> it's
> more elegant.
>
> I imagine RDF core considered this option.  I'm curious why they
> didn't
> take it.   I'll ping a few people.
>
>       -- Sandro

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2008 00:10:01 UTC