Re: Language maps and undefined language

> On Apr 10, 2017, at 11:13 PM, Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Gregg Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> In CSVW, we coined “und” as the undefined/absent language.
> 
> "und" is a perfectly legal language tag, defined in the IANA language
> tag registry:
> 
> Type: language
> Subtag: und
> Description: Undetermined
> Added: 2005-10-16
> Scope: special
> 
> The other language tags in the "special" Scope are:
> 
> zxx: No linguistic content/Not applicable
> mis: Uncoded languages
> mul: Multiple languages
> 
> One might argue that "zxx" is actually equivalent to no language tag.
> Anyway "und" is actually used for "unknown language" in contrast to "no
> language". If your data
> model expects strings to always have languages "und" makes sense but in
> this case there should not be literal strings without language tag
> anyway (see JSKOS json-ld profile for SKOS for an example).

Sounds like we may have got it wrong in CSVW, then. “zxx” seems like the way to go, and could be made equivalent to no language.

“und” is perfectly reasonable to use as a language tag, or as the key in a language map, in JSON-LD. Adding “zxx” makes the language map more consistent.

Gregg

> Robert wrote:
> 
>> If compaction would result in an attempt to add a string without an
>> associated language into a LanguageMap, then the processor SHOULD
>> assign the undefined language code `UND` as the key in the array.
> 
> I'd prefer this:
> 
> If compaction would result in an attempt to add a string without an
> associated language into a LanguageMap, then the processor MUST NOT
> include this string. Instead it SHOULD emit a warning to inform that the
> data to compact does not fit to the expected data model expressed
> by definition of a LanguageMap.
> 
> In theory, any kind of RDF data should be expressible with any kind of
> JSON-LD context. In practice each JSON-LD context defines a data model
> with implicit or explicit assumptions what RDF data to be expressible in
> a meaningful way. I prefer meaningful data over hacks to express data
> that does not conform to expectations anyway.
> 
> What's the actual use case of having non-language strings in language maps?
> 
> Jakob
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2017 00:11:56 UTC