property/class ambiguity in languages with no letter case

In the last few months I've been encouraging people to provide 
translated labels, definitions and usage notes for vocabularies hosted 
in w3.org/ns space [1]. The latest one being worked on is a translation 
of ORG [2] into Japanese, but this has thrown up a problem. ORG uses 
property names beginning with lower case letters, (foo) to link to 
classes named identically except that they begin with a capital letter 
(Foo)*.

In languages with upper and lower case letters this is not a problem, 
but what about those that don't, like Japanese?

Other schemas tend to use verbs as properties and nouns as class names, 
so we might have hasFoo linking to Foo. I am not trying to re-open the 
debate about which is preferable, merely to ask:

Where a vocabulary uses foo and Foo as property and class names 
respectively, to the extent that it might help translation into 
languages without upper and lower case letters, do you agree that we can 
help the translator by suggesting he/she treats the property name 'foo' 
as 'has foo?'

Phil.

* the case that came up is role and Role but I'm trying to generalise.

[1] http://www.w3.org/blog/data/2014/01/06/vocabularies-at-w3c/
[2] http://www.w3.org/ns/org.ttl
-- 


Phil Archer
W3C Data Activity Lead
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Tuesday, 11 February 2014 08:49:18 UTC