RE: Controlled Vocabularies Aid Translation and Content Management

Hi Frank,

Wouldn't this be a wonderful use case for RDF vocabularies, set up by the
different W3C communities in accordance with a nice little common schema,
and linked together by the Semantic Web? Why are the baker's children always
eating old bread?

Regards,
Hans

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Manola [mailto:fmanola@acm.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 17:39
To: Hans Teijgeler
Cc: 'Adrian Walker'; semantic-web@w3.org; 'Karl Dubost'; qa-chairs@w3.org
Subject: Re: Controlled Vocabularies Aid Translation and Content Management

Hans Teijgeler wrote:
> Adrian,
> 
>> So, how is this relevant to w3c?
>  
> It is very relevant to W3C, because their Recommendations are, at 
> times, hard to understand for someone whose native language isn't 
> UK-English or US-English. Add to that the handicap of not belonging to 
> the happy incrowd of W3C, so not being conversant with much of the 
> W3C-specific slang and the abundantly used acronyms.

Hans--

I think you're making the situation simpler than it really is.  Surely by
this time you realize that it isn't only people whose native language isn't
English who find W3C Recommendations "at times, hard to understand"?  And as
for "the happy incrowd of W3C", there certainly seems to be more than one
such crowd, and they often don't appear very happy with each other :-)

> 
> An all-inclusive and normative W3C glossary of terms and acronyms with 
> a crystal clear definitions (in understandable English) would help, 
> provided that all authors would normatively refer to that glossary. A 
> simple case of QA (meaning Quality Assurance - 'The process assuring 
> the quality of one organization's outcomes.' (according [1])).

"An all-inclusive and normative W3C glossary of terms and acronyms with a
crystal clear definitions (in understandable English)" would not only help,
it would be a miracle!  (A great example of how simple this task would be is
to consider the definition of "resource").  I think we might want to start
with something much simpler, like an OWL ontology (nothing like eating your
own dogfood!).

I'd also note that it generally isn't "the-great-W3C-in-the-sky" that gets
things done, it's *volunteers* who get things done, W3C itself not having an
arbitrarily-large workforce.  Things like making W3C Recommendations more
understandable to non-native-English-speakers (or even translating them into
other languages) are examples.  That things don't get done doesn't
necessarily mean the W3C doesn't see them as desirable.

--Frank

>  
> Regards,
> Hans
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/QA/glossary

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Received on Wednesday, 4 October 2006 22:23:09 UTC