Re: natural language

[Yutaka Yoshida <Yutaka.Yoshida@eng.sun.com>]

 > From: lisa.carnahan@nist.gov
 > Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 08:43:35 -0500
 > 
 > 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.
 
 That's exectly what I thought when you brought up this first, and
 I also think it's a useful information. However, my point is that
 locale information(language code and country code) is not enough
 to let users view them correctly. Because it doesn't specify the
 encoding. In other words, only for the viewing purpose, locale
 information is not necessary.

 > 
 > > > :: Lisa ::
 > > > 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?
 > > 
 > > :: yuta ::
 > > 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.
 > > 
 > > 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.
 > 
 > :: Lisa ::
 > 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?

 I'll try to think about what kind of issue is existent in regrep.
 Although I expect most of them would be implementation issues.
 
 yuta