Re: "lastname" and "firstname" are not culturally neutral

Dear Misha,

Thank you for bringing up the issue that the firstname/lastname example
in Use Cases and Requirements was not culturaly neutral. In the current
editor's draft, I have ammended that paragraph with an e-mail address
based example as suggested earlier in this thread. Here is the updated
text:

O11. String manipulation 

The language should support string concatenation and simple pattern
matching. These features can be used to establish interoperability
between ontologies that treat complex information as a formatted string
and those that have separate properties for each component. For example,
one ontology may represent an e-mail address as a single string, while
another may divide it into a string for user name and a string for
server name. To integrate the two ontologies, one would need to specify
that the concatenation of the user name, the '@' character, and the
server name is equivalent to the single value used in the first
ontology.

Please let me know if this is satisfactory.

Sincerely,

Jeff Heflin

Misha Wolf wrote:
> 
> Web Ontology Language (OWL) Use Cases and Requirements
> W3C Working Draft 31 March 2003
> 
> | O11. String manipulation
> |
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-webont-req-20030331/#obj-string-manipulatio
> n
> |
> | The language should support string concatenation and simple pattern
> | matching. These features can be used to establish interoperability
> | between ontologies that treat complex information as a formatted
> string
> | and those that have separate properties for each component. For
> example,
> | one ontology may represent a person's name as a single string
> "lastname,
> | firstname," while another may have a property for each.
> 
> The concepts "lastname" and "firstname" are not culturally neutral.
> What is more, they are fairly meaningless, as one culture or person will
> 
> place the family name last, while another culture or person will place
> the given name last.  If the purpose of such a formatted string were to
> enable, say, sorting by family name, then this purpose would not be
> achieved by the construction "lastname, firstname".
> 
> Please replace "lastname" with "family name" and "firstname" with "given
> name".
> 
> Thanks,
> Misha
> 
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Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 14:45:59 UTC