RE: Term identification

Hi All

I missed the first conference call but will talk to you all tomorrow.

I'm not sure if I should jump onto details at this point even though Tim
provided us wonderful feedbacks to the requirements. Definitely we should
start detail discussion based on his comments soon. Before the second
teleconference, let me throw out my sort of concern in general from the
point of source content authoring.

This term issue is a good example. It's brilliant idea to tag terminology,
but terms in a document tend to be tagged already with, for example, an
index tag:

<p>
Payment terms can range from simple to complex, depending on the policy of
your organization or <idx item="Cost Center" sortingstr="costcenter">cost
center</idx>.
</p>

What we wish to tag as a term ("cost center" in this example) is a concept
pertaining to a specific domain or subject. I would say such a term should
have been tagged with either Index or Glossary tags, for example. Now if we
proposed some sort of a terminology element and attributes, I'm wondering
how it would live together with existing terminology-related tags. What's
happening here is that source writers claim "it's an INDEX item", while
localizers would say "it's a TERM item." ITS's intension may conflict with
DTD design, and now what we do here....?

Another example is Section 2.4 and 2.5. I would say that these will provide
a way to add localization-related annotations to either an element or a part
of element text. When you think about documentation process, source authors
may not care about those comments and instructions. Psychologically ITS tags
are invisible, in a way, for those folks (unfortunately). Now maybe (at
least the documentation process at a company I used to work) final editors
could place some comments and instructions. Mostly translation leads are the
ones who do some pre-process content review and add clear comments on
gotchas for translators. Now what I'm wondering here is what DTD designing
process would be like there. As you don't know where those "downstream
people" add ITS <span>-like tags, all of the elements need to accommodate
the ITS tags (almost everywhere). Is there any good idea to avoid this sort
of overkill?

I'm mainly thinking of XML documentation, rather than XML data storage, and
that may be why I would think of these issues. Maybe it's just simply that
ITS should propose some ways to accommodate I18N tag sets into existing data
structures. Hopefully we can touch on this point during the teleconference
tomorrow.

Thank you.

Masaki Itagaki





-----Original Message-----
From: public-i18n-its-request@w3.org [mailto:public-i18n-its-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Yves Savourel
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 6:26 AM
To: public-i18n-its@w3.org
Subject: Term identification


Thanks Tim for all the comments.
I'll start a few thread from your notes:

 > From Tim's comments on Requirements for localisable DTD design:
 >
 > 2.18 Term identification
 > Yep, this is good : who decides what a Term is though ? This
 > sounds like a bit of repetition though - wasn't

I would see this mechanism used different ways:
- By authors, through their authoring tool interface, to select terms they
know
should be treated as such. - By terminology tools that do term extraction or
translation tools that use a list of known terms.

One note: LISA, who is maintaining TBX (TermBase eXchange format), is
working on
TBK-Link, a light-weight tag set that helps linking terms in the document to
a
TBX store. I think TBX-Link will be available for review soon. Andrzej is
actually one of the editors.

-ys

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2005 23:22:20 UTC