- From: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:33:57 +0100
- To: "Peter Krantz" <peter.krantz@gmail.com>
- Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
Peter, On 17 Dec 2006, at 13:40, Peter Krantz wrote: > We are using RDF to make statements about documents in an information > domain where it is difficult to translate concepts to english (some do > not have a corresponding english word). Should we try to translate > these concepts to english or leave them as they are (and remove > accented characters)? There are two distinct issues here. First, what URIs to use for your concepts? Second, what rdfs:label to use for the concepts? The second one is the smaller problem, you can use literals with language tag to attach multilingual labels to concepts, and all Unicode characters are allowed. So, provide labels in all languages that users of your application are likely to need. The first question, what URIs to use, is harder. You should keep in mind though that end users should normally not see the URIs, that's what the labels are for. So, in theory you could avoid the problem and use URIs like http://my-namespace/123 instead of http://my- namespace/difficult-to-translate-concept. But that would be hard on the people who work with the URIs directly -- ontology engineers, software developers, and the like. Using mnemonic URIs is of course much more convenient for them. So I guess you should ask yourself if everyone who is likely to work directly with the RDF is able to understand the untranslated concept names. If the answer is yes, then I think using the original language in the URIs is a good solution. Richard > > Is there anyone else that has had the same question and what was > your approach? > > Kind regards, > > Peter > >
Received on Sunday, 17 December 2006 19:35:09 UTC