- From: <editor@content-wire.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:55:02 -0400
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
>> So, how is this relevant to w3c? Global English is not just a question between British, American English and Rest of The World English - IMHO I used the term Global English first on a website in 2001. (Content-wire about us statement) -it's still there. My purist colleagues who loved to argue for hours about spelling and other language style choices including punctuation - smiled then, saying 'Global English' whats that then? What we meant was: 'not this, and not that' (neti neti) The question that comes up today, and relevant here - is that the differences in meaning and interpretations of words are not just cultural linguistics, but depend individual perspective and background, as well as on the domain that they are applied to. This is why specialist domains require controlled vocabulary, and this is why for specific and/or critical missions people use CODE language, that defines meaning to extreme precision and sometimes even quantitative measurements. The relevance to W3 is that languages - that includes English - are conventions. In this world people have different conventions, and when you want to minise misunderstandings, shared conventions are agreed and adopted. The relevance of my question of 'is it a documentation issue or not' may not be immediate. >From an organisational viewpoint - ie when getting a job done - as well as in terms of information systems design - when developing software - such differences in interpretations should be mapped early, to minimise waste of development resources later. Nowadays we work with highly distributed teams on collaborative projects, that are loosely coordinated - and communicated online - so a semantic consistency -not just linguistic - is key in ensuring conceptual cohesion. People dont just come form different linguistic backgrounds, oh no. because within the same linguistic background, they have different degrees of literacy - some coders and engs speak excellent java but when it comes down to English let's admit it is not their thing - People also have different mindsets, beliefs, value systems, history, contexts, communicatin abilities, environments, This reflects ON how they use words, even when using the same language. And straightening things out is still in W3 mission, right? In my experience, in systems development such reasoning about conceptual model is to be faced early, at data/knowledge/information modelling stage. Documentation is too often still an a-posteriori actitivity in system developments, and is generally not sufficiently integrated with the early stages of development. I would be interested to hear at what stage f their process do other organisations place the semantic consistency issues - but when it's left for too late then a lot of work will have to done again. Paola Di Maio -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .
Received on Thursday, 5 October 2006 05:01:27 UTC