RE: [DPUB-ANNOTATION-UC] 2.1.3 general observation about language identification [I18N-ISSUE-458]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the reply.

Note that references to language tags should refer to BCP 47 rather than to (one of) the underlying RFCs such as 5646. BCP 47 is a stable reference.

I don’t agree that language and direction metadata should be lumped with other types of metadata. The best practice for natural language text fields is to provide for language and base direction metadata in the document structure at the field level, which is why our comment calls it out. That’s because each field may be in a different language or have a different base direction. Note that this is consistent with e.g. HTML5 and with a number of ebook formats.

The language may also be a separate field at the document level and this comment isn’t about the kinds of metadata (including language) as you list in your reply.

(Note that the I18N WG is publishing a FPWD of “best practices for specification authors” this coming week that details some of the items above and may be helpful to your WG. See http://w3c.github.io/bp-i18n-specdev/#lang_resource)

Thanks,

Addison

From: Robert Sanderson [mailto:azaroth42@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2015 2:24 AM
To: Phillips, Addison
Cc: public-digipub@w3.org; public-i18n-core@w3.org; Web Annotation
Subject: Re: [DPUB-ANNOTATION-UC] 2.1.3 general observation about language identification [I18N-ISSUE-458]


Thanks again for the comments.

I agree that language metadata is important and that the set of use cases does not specifically include any metadata about the body or target resources.  That was somewhat intentional, so as to avoid trying to list out all of the possible descriptive features for resources, such as creator, creation time, language, file format, license or other rights statements, intended audience and so forth.  These are listed for the annotation itself, as the primary resource of interest.

In the Web Annotation data model, the language is explicitly included along with format and general class of the resource [1].  In the upcoming WD (next week [2]), we also add creator and creation time.  For language we refer to RFC 5646 as the value of the language property.  Is that sufficient to cover the requirements?

Many thanks,

Rob

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/#body-and-target-metadata

[2] http://azaroth42.github.io/web-annotation/model/wd/index-renamed.html




On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com<mailto:addison@lab126.com>> wrote:
[1] 2.1.3 general observation about language identification
Description:
    http://www.w3.org/TR/dpub-annotation-uc/


    2.1.3 general observation about language identification

    Tags and annotations generally use natural language tokens (such as words). While Unicode allows text to be stored, passed, and processed without regard for the specific language, it is the case that strings can benefit from language metadata for character shaping, spell-checking, font selection and more. In additional, directionality information is usually desired.




--
Rob Sanderson
Information Standards Advocate
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305