RE: WebOnt Requirements - I18N

At 12:47 PM +0000 12/12/01, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>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

I don't think I agree, but I do see it will be a case we have to make 
carefully.  In my mind the issue is that the node names in an 
ontology have no real meaning (I could simply use the following)
  :G001 a WOL:class
    ... WOL:onProperty :G002
    ... WOL:hasProperty :G003
etc

i.e. the content of the ontology is up to the creator to 
internationalize, not our langauge.  Thus, in a technical sense, we 
can use whatever labeling scheme XML or RDF allows, and have multiple 
labels or whatever

  :G001 a WOL:class;
    english:label "Moose";
    french:label "Elk du Canada".

or however it is handled.

However, that said, what I thought was out of scope was for us to be 
inventing a new internationalization approach instead of doing what 
would be required by I18N-WG or at least coordinating with them if we 
want to look at new approches.
  -JH



-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2001 08:54:07 UTC