Re: Usage of language tags in SKOS

I very much agree with Felix on this. Something like
    skos:prefLabel "FRA"@en-x-notation-threeletter
is totally weird. Just because RDF does allow to tag strings with 
languages doesn't mean that this should be misused for anything and 
everything. RDF also has typing, and typing would be much more appropriate.

[As shepherd of 4646bis, I just was telling the responsible AD (who was 
thinking about going as far as disallowing them) that use of private use 
tags for language tags is very infrequent. So much for that :-(]

Regards,   Martin.


On 2009/06/23 6:55, Felix Sasaki wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> looking at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-skos-primer-20090615/#secnotations
> I am wondering if SKOS recommends the usage of language tags in an
> appropriate manner. I am not sure about this passage:
>
> [
> However, the management of such datatypes can be cumbersome. Further, the
> previous pattern is not really needed when publishers consider the notations
> themselves to be simple language-independent labels. In such cases, it is
> possible to use one SKOS labeling property, for instance skos:prefLabel, in
> combination with private use language tags (or subtags) as defined by RFC
> 4646 [RFC4646]. This pattern was first proposed for a list of coded
> countries [COUNTRYCODES-SKOS] from which the following example is adapted:
> iso3166:FR skos:prefLabel "France"@en ;
>    skos:prefLabel "FRA"@en-x-notation-threeletter ;
>    skos:prefLabel "250"@x-notation-numerical.
> ]
>
> First, private use language tags are recommended to be used for a
> "language-independent-label", which seems to be a contradiction in itself.
> Second, the labels are used for specifying the language of notations as part
> of e.g. classifications. Notations for classifications are not natural
> language, but rather closer to identifiers in programming languages, so it
> seems to me that usage of language tags is not appropriate for this purpose.
> Any comments?
>
> Best,
>
> Felix
>

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 03:57:09 UTC