Anne-Marie writes...

> Dear Collegues,
> 
> I am currently translating the DC1.1 definition as found at:
> http://purl.oclc.org/dc/documents/rec-dces-19990702.htm
> 
> If you look at the source, this document contains three parts:
> 
> 1) DC metadata about the document itself (using a bootstrap 
> of the definition!)
> 
> 2) the RDF definition of DC.1.1
> 
> 3) the textual definition of DC1.1 in plain English
> 
> Each of these parts presents some difficulty for the 
> translation (French as an
> example):

Combining all of these in one document presents difficulties in parsing the
appropriate information... Specifically with regards to translations, I'm
now wondering if it would make more sense to separate these into individual
documents.  This approach also has some issues associated with but I think
this may be the better way... more on this in a bit.

> 1) DC metadata about the French version should/could  be 
> expressed in French
> (or both French and English).

I don't believe this has been agreed on yet by the dc-international group,
but it is my hope that each translation of the DCES would have with it
metadata in its native language. 

>   Then I need to add a xml:lang attribute and I am not sure 
> how to do it with
> the rdf syntax used in the English version (a simplified  syntax)
> 
> I changed it to  (is this correct?):
> 
> <rdf:Description about=
>  "http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~vercoust/METADATA/DC1.1-fr.html"> 
>     <dc:title xml:lang="fr">Le Dublin Core Version 
> 1.1</dc:title>       
>     <dc:creator>Dublin Core Metadata Inititative</ dc:creator>
>     <dc:contributor>Anne-Marie Vercoustre</dc:contributor> 
>     <dc:contributor>[log in to unmask]</dc:contributor>
>     <dc:language>fr</dc:language>
>     <dc:description xml:lang="fr">Le Dublin Core est un 
> ensemble simple
> d'éléments de metadonnées pour faciliter la recherche de 
> ressources digitales.
> The document présente la nouvelle définition, en français, de 
> ces éléments.
>     <dc:date>2000-02-15</dc:date> 
>     </dc:description>
>  </rdf:Description>
> 
> Is this correct? 

Yes. 

> Embeddable in HTML?
> (cf.http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc/datamodel/WD-
> dc-rdf/) 
> Is there a simpler way?

Unfortunately, there is no simple way of syntactically including XML in
HTML. The 'abbreviated' way of representing the above syntax is one way of
ensuring backward-compatible rendering.  Another way is the way you
currently have done this using comments e.g. "<!-- XML/RDF text here -->",
but only one application that I know of currently support this approach. 

Another option (and this is the way the DCMI site currently does this) is to
use the LINK tag to externally reference an XML document from the HTML
document. 

e.g. inside of the HTML HEAD:

<LINK rel="metadata" href="url-to-xml-rdf-metadata">
 
> 2) In the RDF formal definition where to put the information 
> that this is the
> DC1.1 definition in French?

Excellent question.  This issue is basically the reason why I'd suggest
serparating the HTML document and the formal XML/RDF definition into
separate resources (Both with their own descriptions).  This makes document
management a bit more difficult (you now have 3 documents instead of 1), but
its much clearer from the standpoit of what is being described. 

Specifically there would be 3 documents: (A, B and C)

A is an HTML document 
B is a XML/RDF document about A
A references B via LINK element

C is an XML/RDF document (which contains both the metadata and the RDF
schema declaration)

an sample example of C in this case would be
http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/eor/2000/03/13-dces.fr

And in this case, since C is itself an XML/RDF document, its easly to simply
syntaxcitically include the corresponding metadata. 

> 3) For the textual translation, I have a problem with the 
> following statement:
> 
> Fortunately, six of the above ten attributes are common to 
> all the Dublin Core
> elements. These are, with their respective values:
> 
>   Version:                1.1 
>   Registration Authority: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
>   Language:               en
>   Obligation:             Optional
>   Datatype:               Character String
>   Maximum Occurrence:     Unlimited</PRE>
> 
> Of course this is not true for  French ressources since 
> Language should be (by
> default) set to "fr".
> 
> Should I say that, by default:
>    Language:    fr
> 
> But using a French definition of the DC does mean one  
> describes only, or even
> mostly, French resources.
> 
> Or, should the English definition be changed to be a bit more 
> international in
> first place?
> (i.e saying that five DC attributes have common default values)

I think Ren has answered this question...  

One concern I have about translating over the ISO11179 portions of this DCES
reference document, however, is that (given my understanding) ISO11179 would
treat these as additional elements and I don't think that is what we really
want to say. I think rather we want to say these are the *same* elements,
simply with different human readable labels and definitions (in this the
French translation of these elements).  Is my understanding regarding 11179
correct on this?

> Has anyone encountered these problems?
> Can someone (Eric Miller, Renato Ianella ??) give me the solutions?
> 
> It is clearly part of the DC-International working group to 
> address these
> problems, especially when dealing with the DC registery.

agreed! A formal means of expressing these translations are critical for
supporting a distributed DCMI registry.  In the process of prototyping such
a registry, I've normalized on the following expression based on the RDF
Schema work: 

DCES in french: http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/eor/2000/03/13-dces.fr
DCES in german: http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/eor/2000/03/13-dces.de

(Please note: these are not officially endorsed by the DCMI nor are they
actually complete... they simply are place-holders designed for testing and
illustrative purposes.)

The idea is that if the individual translations are expressed in the same
syntactic way they can be incorporated into a common distributed, registry
system.  An example of incorporating such translations into such a system is

http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/myrdf/services/EOpenRegistry?type=*&object=Contribut
or

And the set of all schemas that currently make up this registry can be found
at
http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/myrdf/services/EOpenRegistry?type=http%3a%2f%2frdf%2
edev%2eoclc%2eorg%2feor%2f2000%2f03%2f13%2dmyrdf%23Schema

(if you notice... the metadata that is syntactically included in each of the
above schemas is what is deplayed when you click the above link).

Anne-Marie, (or anyone willing to take on this task :) if this makes sense
to you, would you be willing to help with such a system?  If so, could you
take http://rdf.dev.oclc.org/eor/2000/03/13-dces.fr as a template for
expressing DCES 1.1 in French (or any other language) and forward the URL to
the list so I can infuse this into the registry?

--eric




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