Re: FOAF: names with different scriptings

Karl Dubost wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to know how to express names with different scriptings
> depending on the country. For example, Chinese and Japanese name have
> often a romanized version.
> 
>     KUROSAWA Akira
>     黒澤明
> 
> In the same way western names in Japan have a spelling in Katakana
> 
>     Karl Dubost
>     カール デュボスト
> 
> How do we write that in FOAF/n3 or FOAF/RDF?

I'd long wondered this. I wanted it also for writing RDF describing
language-learning "flashcards" for Japanese and Arabic. Fortunately the
W3C I18N folk have recently published
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php
which explains how to do just this, ie using constructs such as

es-419 Spanish as used in Latin America
zh-Hans Chinese written with Simplified script etc

This is nothing specific to names, to FOAF, or even to RDF. Just some
clarifications on language subtags in the relevant RFCs.

I recommend everyone take a look at the doc. It's short, simple and very
useful.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry is the relevant
'subtag' registry. A candidate for RDFization perhaps?

For me, the biggest unknown with RDF/FOAF naming, is how we deal with
names that require markup (eg. Ruby annotion). And how badly needed such
markup is.

The IANA registry page seems unaccessible right now. I was going to look
to see how they model Japanese script, ie. whether it is possible to
distinguish katakana from kanjii...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 1 October 2006 13:53:44 UTC