Re: natural language

[lisa.carnahan@nist.gov]

At 01:53 PM 03/29/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>
> > From: lisa.carnahan@nist.gov
> > X-Sender: carnahan@mailserver.nist.gov
> > Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 15:37:52 -0500
> > 
> > In thinking about the  information that a submitter would want a user to
> > know, the issue of natural languages has come up.
> > 
> > Two questions: 
> > 
> > Should we specify an element that contains the natural language that the
> > metadata is written in?
> 
> I'm not sure what you want to do with that information, but probably,
> I guess the problem here is not that it lacks the information about
> natural language, but that it lacks the information about the
> encoding in which the element is.
> So, in that case, I think we need to have the element which tells
> what the encoding of the whole metadata is.
> (Lisa, please enlighten me if you have other concerns about the
> natural language.)

Regarding the natural language of the metadata:   Is there a possibility
that an organization (an SO) would want to register an object, and provide
the metadata to that object in a language other than english?  If I, as a
user, then wish to read the metadata about the object, wouldn't it be
useful to know the language that I am looking at (assuming that I can't
determine the language used merely by looking at it?).

I'm willing to accept that I may be the only one who sees this as useful
information.

> 
> However, it brings up another question: is it likely that
> one element is written in one language and the other element is
> in another language?
>
> > Should we specify an element that contains the natural language that the
> > registered-item (data element) is written in?   I'm assuming that
> > XML-related  and SGML-related documents can be written in natural
languages
> > other than english?
> 
> Yes, I think so. Also, in this case, it's very likely that one
> registered item is written in one language and the other item is
> written in the other language even they are in one 'packaged'
> objects.
> > 
> > We could use language-code as defined by ISO639 and a subcode of
> > country-code as defined by ISO3166.  (This is IMS' usage.)
> 
> Lang. code and country code are not enough. We need the encoding
> information.
> Or, do we accept only one of the unicode, such as utf-8, or utf-16?
> 
> I feel that's not the only issue in internationalization, and perhaps
> we should list up the issues and discuss them when we have a chance,
> I don't know how deep we want to step into i18n field from the
> point of regrep spec, though.

I vote for having a 'natural language' element to describe the natural
language of the  data element (registered-item).    I'm not familiar enough
with the internationalization issues described above to have an opinion
beyond that.   Anyone?

> 
> yuta
> > 
> > --lisa
>
>
>

Lisa J. Carnahan
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Information Technology Laboratory
Room 562, Bldg. 820
Gaithersburg, Md. 20899
USA

lisa.carnahan@nist.gov
(301) 975-3362 voice 
(301) 948-6213 fax