>>>Maybe I missed something, or it's just my naivety (I'm new to the list).
>>>But would it not be possible to permit synonyms? Could we not permit
>>>EITHER organisation or organization to be provided? Equally center/centre,
>>>and so on.
>>No. Unlike human beings, computers are completely incapable of seeing
>>"organization" as equivalent to "organisation", and while a computer
>>*could* be made to recognize both instances as corresponding to a general
>>category, that would be far more complicated than simply standardizing the
>>use.
>
>please excuse my techiness, but surely this isn't true, parsing
>the likes of
>
>[organization|organisation]
>
>is absolutely trivial. Surely the key point is that we should
>make the use of this easy for the USER, not worrying about
>adding one line to the language parser!
A single name for a given element is generally useful,
eg when discussing a list of elements, choosing a field name
for a database etc.
The name will appear of course in the metadata record, but also
in search requests. We don't want the search engine to have to
translate requests for 'organisation' to 'organization', as well
as the indexing engine.
In our application, the end user will never see this string:
it will probably appear on the GUI in the user's own language, as
the label of a data entry field, or in a drop-down list.
Charles
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