- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:47:25 -0000
- To: <hendler@cs.umd.edu>, "Jeff Heflin" <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>, <herman.ter.horst@philips.com>, <dlm@ksl.stanford.edu>, <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>, <ned.smith@intel.com>
- Cc: <www-archive@w3.org>
Jim: > >R11. Internationalization > > I think this is out of scope unless very focused on ontology-specific > issues of internationalization - W3C has other folks > w/internationalization as a specific focus and we don't want to stray > into their area. With respect, the I18N-wg will disagree. The charmod wd will probably come to rec before we do, and we will be bound by the constraints that charmod places on W3C recommendations. http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod I do not believe these will be heavy, but we will need to give some account of i18n and the webont language. In fact, a quick scan suggests that all the current suggestions for requirements for specificiations (marked in S) are ones that should be met at a lower layer (e.g. XML or RDF). The core issue for webont and I18N, as I see it at the moment, is that in an ontology that has a property named in american english "color", there is no way currently in any of the lower layers (XML, RDF) to express that this is american english, and that the british english is "colour", and the italian "colore". This is because the property names are the fragment IDs of URI references, and there is no way in the current stack of attaching a language tag to URIs, URI references or fragment IDs. I note that in some cases where the same word means different things in different languages (e.g. "shopping" in English & Italian) this could become a significant problem. We may well need to have a fairly significant effort to explain how ontologies can be internationalised. Jeremy
Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2001 07:47:50 UTC