RE: Request for feedback on SKOS Last Call Working Draft

Hi Alistair,

Thanks for replying to these questions (and thanks to Antoine for replying earlier).  I think much of Addison's intervention has circled around these questions.

My main concern is how your WG will ensure that these topics do eventually get picked up for discussion and become the subject of a separate note, as you suggest, rather than this discussion evaporating.  Do you have a process for that?  Because I think these are quite important things to address for SKOS and related technologies to provide solutions that will work in an interoperable way.

Wrt text for the reference to BCP47, since Addison is one of the authors of that spec, I'm happy to leave that to him.

Hope that helps,
Cheers,

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alistair Miles [mailto:alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk]
> Sent: 10 March 2009 17:39
> To: Richard Ishida
> Cc: public-swd-wg@w3.org; 'Ralph R. Swick'; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Request for feedback on SKOS Last Call Working Draft
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
> On the question of example 11, I hope my previous email [1] helped to
> clarify.
> 
> Here are some comments on the other points you originally made..
> 
> On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 05:27:36PM -0000, Richard Ishida wrote:
> > On a slightly different tack, what's the advice wrt when one should use, eg.,
> en-GB / en-US / en?
> 
> We haven't discussed this in any depth in the WG.
> 
> I think advice on when to use e.g. en / en-GB / en-US is out of scope
> for the SKOS Reference, which just serves to establish the data model,
> and tries to defer on detailed usage guidance to the SKOS Primer and
> other documents that may be developed within the community of practice
> in response to implementation experience. I would hope that a best
> practice could be developed and published by the community of practice
> in the near future.
> 
> > I would have thought that one should use en unless there are divergent
> spellings (eg. colour vs color) or locutions (eg. lift vs elevator), but example
> 19 shows
> >
> > "color"@en , "color"@en-US , "colour"@en-GB .
> >
> > which seems to present two problems:
> >
> > [1] it requires a lot more annotation than strictly necessary, since
> applications using this data ought to be able to tell that "color"@en  is
> appropriate for en-US in the absence of a specific "color"@en-US label (three
> is already doubly redundant here, but there are more varieties of English
> than this, eg. en-AU,en-IR, etc....)
> >
> > [2] without this matching capability, you could end up with unnecessary
> gaps in the data (for example, what about a search originating from an en-
> AU context? As it stands, the implication seems to be that it wouldn't match
> this perfectly adequate literal).
> >
> > I would have expected that processing tools should recognise that a search
> originated from an en-GB context also matches en in the absence of
> alternatives with longer subtags.
> 
> Example 19 is only intended to illustrate a technical feature of the
> SKOS data model, which is that a resource has at most one value of
> skos:prefLabel per language tag, and as "en" "en-US" and "en-GB" are
> different language tags, the example is therefore consistent wrt the
> SKOS data model.
> 
> The example is not intended to suggest or imply any best practices wrt
> provision of labels with or without language variants. I think that is
> out of scope for the SKOS Reference, and hope that detailed guidance
> on how to deal with language variations could be developed more fully
> in a separate note, by another WG or by the community of practice.
> 
> Also, any recommendation on how processing tools should deal with
> language variants is also, IMO, out of scope for the SKOS
> Reference. However, I would be more than happy to make reference to
> the filtering and lookup algorithms defined in RFC4647 as possible
> implementation strategies, as suggested by Addison [1]. If you have
> any thoughts on how to word some prose regarding RFC4647 for the SKOS
> Reference, I'd be very glad to hear them.
> 
> > There is another small issue here related to the "colour"@en declaration.
> Why is the American spelling used for en? What would happen if the English
> spelling were used in some places? Is there a stated policy that en = US
> English?
> 
> Just to reiterate, this example is arbitrary, and is intended only to
> illustrate a technical feature of the SKOS data model. However,
> because I had to choose some value for en, and because the official
> language of W3C tech reports is US english, I chose the US english
> spelling.
> 
> There is no stated policy that en = US english. Again, I hope that
> best practices on how to choose between variants to populate labels
> for primary language subtags would be dealt with by the community of
> practice.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alistair
> 
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2009Mar/0020.html
> [ISSUE-191] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/191
> 
> >
> > Cheers,
> > RI
> >
> > ============
> > Richard Ishida
> > Internationalization Lead
> > W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/International/
> > http://rishida.net/
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Felix Sasaki [mailto:fsasaki@w3.org]
> > > Sent: 24 January 2009 08:19
> > > To: Ralph R. Swick
> > > Cc: public-i18n-core@w3.org; chairs@w3.org; ishida@w3.org; public-
> swd-
> > > wg@w3.org
> > > Subject: Re: Request for feedback on SKOS Last Call Working Draft
> > >
> > > I looked at this briefly and have a personal, editorial comment.
> > >
> > > You write for example in sec. 5
> > >
> > > "The following graph is consistent, and illustrates the provision of
> > > lexical labels in four different languages (Japanese Kanji, Japanese
> > > Hiragana, Japanese Katakana and Japanese Rōmaji)."
> > >
> > > I would rather say
> > >
> > > "The following graph is consistent, and illustrates the provision of
> > > lexical labels in four different variations (Japanese written with
> > > Kanji, the Hiragana script, the Katakana script or with latin characters
> > > (Rōmaji))."
> > >
> > > Since all examples are Japanese and differ only with regards to the
> > > script in use.
> > >
> > > I think this concerns sec. 5.1 ("Japanese Hiragana"), 5.4, and 5.5.
> > >
> > > Regards, Felix
> > >
> > > Ralph R. Swick さんは書きました:
> > > > Dear I18N Core Working Group (and other interested Chairs),
> > > >
> > > > The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group requests any feedback
> > > > you may have on the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
> > > > Vocabulary Reference specification [1].
> > > >
> > > >   [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080829/
> > > >
> > > > This document was published as a W3C Last Call Working Draft
> > > > on 29 August 2008 [2]. The SemWeb Deployment Working Group
> > > > requested CR transition on 7 January 2009 [3].
> > > >
> > > >   [2] http://www.w3.org/News/2008#item148
> > > >   [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2009JanMar/0000.html
> > > >
> > > > It appears that due to an oversight there was not an explicit notice
> > > > to chairs@w3.org of the Last Call publication.  Therefore we cannot
> > > > be assured that you had the necessary notice should you have
> > > > planned to do an I18N review of this document.
> > > >
> > > > The most likely subject matter for I18N consideration is the
> > > > SKOS lexical labelling properties [4].
> > > >
> > > >   [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080829/#L2831
> > > >
> > > > On behalf of the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group,
> > > > I request that you to consider whether you wish to offer any
> > > > comments on the SKOS Reference Last Call Working Draft
> > > > and to let us know an approximate schedule should you wish
> > > > to send comments.
> > > >
> > > > Thank you,
> > > > Ralph Swick
> > > > SemWeb Deployment WG Team Contact
> > > >
> > > >
> >
> >
> >
> 
> --
> Alistair Miles
> Senior Computing Officer
> Image Bioinformatics Research Group
> Department of Zoology
> The Tinbergen Building
> University of Oxford
> South Parks Road
> Oxford
> OX1 3PS
> United Kingdom
> Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
> Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 18:50:02 UTC