RDF calendar schemas -language

Brian:
| > xml takes care of specifying data in Unicode, but how does
| > it signify that the textual description of an event is in
| > French?
|
Aaron:
|
|     <description xml:lang="fr">blah blah blah</description>
|
Greg:

Yes that is correct.  And in iCal/SkiCal as well...

DESCRIPTION; LANGUAGE="fr":blah blah blah

Both instances mean that the language used for one particular
Ellement(Property) in a Calendar object is French.

And this means that we can also have multi-language description in the same
calendar object.

<description xml:lang="fr">blah blah blah</description>
<description xml:lang="de">vlah vlah vlah</description>

So far so good, but there is another little problem, though perhaps not as
exciting as Mayan calendars - or as difficult to solve.

SkiCal describes events, or resources or "SkiSources" as we reluctantly
named them to avoid confusion with RDF and iCal use of "Resource" (which of
course differ from each other anyway).

A SkiSource could very well be a series of lectures.  I attended CeBit last
year and there was a lecture series. Some of the lectures were in English
and some were in German.

So if you wanted to create a calendar object for each lecture - you might
want to do so in several languages, after all people usually like to use
their own language in their date books;


<description xml:lang="en">Lecture - Why COBAL will never die"</description>
<description xml:lang="se">Förelässning - Varför COBAL kan aldrig
dör</description>

..but this does not tell us what language the lecture is actually being
given in.

So let us say that this is lecture is to be in German.  Another tag is
needed to point this out.  The SkiCal group submitted "LANGUE" since we
thought it would be nice to get at least one French word in our schema.
LANGUE's purpose was to show what language(s) were used at a SkiSource.

The need for this property was understood, even by people living in Ohio,
but it was decided that LANGUE was to close to LANGUAGE and therefore the
name was changed to EVENT_LANGUAGE.

So the object could look like this:

<event_language>German</event_language>
<description xml:lang="en">Lecture - Why COBAL will never die</description>
<description xml:lang="se">Föreläsning - Varför COBAL kan aldrig
dör</description>

and of course you could do things like this if you wanted to:

<event_language xml:lang="en">German</event_language>
<event_language xml:lang="se">Tyska</event_language>

which declares that the event language is German, both in English and in
Swedish:-)

Oh, one more thing.  There were translations provided at the lectures.  You
might think that this nullifies the need for some of the descriptions above.
But if you have ever experienced simultaneous interpreting, though you may
marvel at the interpreter skills, you will probably wish you could
understand the original.

Therefore we felt that it was a good idea to see translations as RESOURCES
and consequently our example snippet would look like this;

<event_language>German</event_language>
<description xml:lang="en">Lecture - Why COBAL will never die</description>
<description xml:lang="se">Föreläsning - Varför COBAL kan aldrig
dör</description>
<resources>Simultaneous translation to English through headsets is
provided</resources>

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2001 04:03:54 UTC