On Sat, 14 Oct 2000, David Dorman wrote:
>Although the Dublin Core Names are currently in English, if Dublin Core
>is implemented in RDF/XML, then the name of a Dublin Core Element would
>point to a specific URL within the Dublin Core namespace, which in
>actuality would be a mathematical expression, and hence language
>independent. Under such an implementation, the way the label is
>displayed to the user in the Metadata could be controlled by a language
>interface, but the actual Name would be the mathematical expression to
>which the label is linked.
In "A Grammar of Dublin Core," just published at
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/baker/10baker.html, I put it this way:
Strictly speaking, elements and qualifiers are represented by
machine-readable tokens that stand for general concepts such as
"title," "subject," and "date." The Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative discusses and approves their definitions in
English. In principle, however, they can be labelled and
defined equally well in any other language, such as Dutch or
Arabic or Thai. For example, dc:creator may be labeled
"Creatore" in Italian, "Pencipta" in Bahasa Indonesian, or
"Verfasser" in German. To date, the element set has been
translated into twenty-six languages. Bear in mind as you read
that although this grammar is written in English, a Japanese
version could translate every English word here into Japanese
-- all grammar terms and example sentences included -- _except_
for the English-like names of the tokens themselves.
Tom Baker
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker [log in to unmask]
GMD Library
Schloss Birlinghoven +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
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