Dear all,
Harry made an important posting about the RDF modelling of
translations of element labels and definitions in German and
other languages. He made the posting in three different groups,
so I was uncertain where to reply; I ended up posting in
dc-architecture because it has alot to do with encoding issues,
but obviously the issues also relate to the Registry and to
Internationalization/Localization (see attached posting).
Readers of dc-international will be especially interested in
the issues described below.
Rather than continue to cross-post (which is strongly
discouraged), I suggest we continue the discussion in
dc-architecture.
Tom
On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 07:14:25AM +0200, Thomas Baker wrote:
> Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 07:14:25 +0200
> From: Thomas Baker <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Provenance
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> > I can see how, given this model, I can (programmatically) get from dc:title
> > to the resources described in "#deDE_1" and "#deDE_2" (by looking for an
> > rdf:Statement with an rdf:Subject of dc:title), but how would a program get
> > from dc:title to the resource described in "#deDE_0"?
>
> Harry, Roland, (attn: Shigeo and Eric),
>
> This discussion touches on a crucial feature of RDF --
> the ability to overlay annotations, in this case translated
> labels and definitions. It moves us further towards goals
> that were recognized and discussed at a series of meetings
> of the Working Group for DC in Multiple Languages in 1997
> and 1998 (see [1] and [2]). In this somewhat long posting,
> I lay out two requirements that may not be addressed by the
> current approach, but could be. These are summarized as two
> questions at the end.
>
> The position paper of mid-1998 [1] recognized that "versions"
> (preferred over "translations" at the time) of Dublin Core
> elements in various languages should share a single namespace
> (Point 4) and proposed a now-outdated RDF encoding of the
> Title element in French (Point 6). Importantly, the paper
> also suggested that: "Versions of the Dublin Core in other
> languages should cite the specific English version on which
> they are based (eg, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0...), as that canonical
> version will evolve over time". Shigeo, his colleagues at
> ULIS, and I explored the implications of versioning in a
> paper early last year [3].
>
> In that paper, we proposed some general requirements with
> regard to versioning translations (Section 4):
>
> -- that for long-term access to legacy metadata as well as
> for the needs of software developers it should be possible
> to reconstruct the exact labels and definitions in use at
> a particular point in time (Points 1 and 3);
>
> -- that the set of terms should grow incrementally, not by
> infrequent, numbered releases such as "Dublin Core 2.0"
> (Point 5) -- the paper summarizes discussion of this issue
> in DC-AC in 1999 (Section 5);
>
> -- that namespace URIs remain stable through successive
> versions (Points 2 and 4), which is now addressed by
> the DCMI Namespace Policy;
>
> -- and, importantly, that the translation of a term into
> Japanese needs to reference a unique identifier for the
> specific historical version translated (Points 6 and 7).
> This requirement emerged from our sense that inevitably,
> translations would lag somewhat behind the "canonical"
> English version, even if the resulting differences of
> wording were to have no significant impact on applications
> (see the DCMI Namespace Policy).
>
> This need to uniquely identify a historical version of a term
> is roughly "prototyped" in the new Usage Board document -- for
> example, consider the two historical versions of "dc:title":
>
> VMS-ID: title-002
> URI: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title
> [-- Label, Definition, etc of dc:title, DCMES 1.1 --]
> Replaces: http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/dc/#title-001
>
> VMS-ID: title-001
> URI: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title
> [-- Label, Definition, etc of dc:title, DCMES 1.0 --]
> isReplacedBy: http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/dc/#title-002
>
> .. where the state of the Title term in DCES 1.0 is
> (prototypically, at least) "uniquely identified" as "title-001"
> -- for example, try clicking on the mirrored document at
> http://www.gmd.de/People/Thomas.Baker/usage/terms/dc/#title-001.
>
> With these issues in mind, I have two questions about the
> proposed RDF syntax below:
>
> 1) Could "translation annotations" of this form in principle
> be distributed over -- and harvested from -- multiple
> Web sites? The whole thrust of the 1997-1999 discussion
> was that German translations would be maintained by
> German-speaking organizations. The alternative -- that
> DCMI would hold and maintain all translations centrally --
> seemed then and still seem both impractical and politically
> undesirable.
>
> 2) Could an RDF statement be added to point to the uniquely
> identified historical version of an element? For example,
> could a translation of "dc:language" point to the DCES 1.0
> version at http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/dc/#language-001
> (or an equivalent).
>
> Tom
>
> [1] http://dublincore.org/groups/languages/mr-19980525.shtml
> [2] http://dublincore.org/groups/languages/
> [3] http://avalon.ulis.ac.jp/~sugimoto/RPs/saint.pdf
>
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 04:25:35PM -0400, Harry Wagner wrote:
> > > > <!-- Begin: Title Declaration -->
> > > > <rdf:Property rdf:about = "&dcns;title"/>
> > > >
> > > > <rdf:Description rdf:about = "&dcns;title" bagID="deDe_0">
> > > > <rdfs:label rdf:ID="deDE_1" xml:lang="de-DE">Titel</rdfs:label>
> > > > <rdfs:comment rdf:ID="deDE_2" xml:lang="de-DE">Titel der
> > > > Quelle; der vom Verfasser, Urheber oder Verleger vergebene
> > > > Namen der Ressource</rdfs:comment>
> > > > </rdf:Description>
> > > >
> > > > <rdf:Description rdf:about="#deDe_0">
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="de-DE">
> > > > Sprachabhaengiger Teil der Deklaration eines
> > > > DC-Terms in Deutsch.
> > > > </dc:description>
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="en-US">
> > > > Language dependent part of the deklaration of a DC
> > > > Term in German.
> > > > </dc:description>
> > > > <dc:publisher>DCMI</dc:publisher>
> > > > <dc:source rdf:resource="http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces"/>
> > > > </rdf:Description>
> > > >
> > > > <rdf:Description rdf:about="#deDE_1">
> > > > <dc:creator>Diann</dc:creator>
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="de-DE">Zuordnung eines
> > > > deutschen Labels zu einem DC Term</dc:description>
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="en-US">Association of a
> > > > German label to a DC term</dc:description>
> > > > <dc:publisher>DCMI</dc:publisher>
> > > > <dc:rights xml:lang="de-DE">
> > > > Die publizierende Organisation uebernimmt keine
> > > > Gewaehr fuer die Richtigkeit der Zuordnung des deutschen Ausdrucks.
> > > > </dc:rights>
> > > > <dc:rights xml:lang="en-US">The publisher disclaims
> > > > any responsibility for the correctnes of the association
> > > > of the German expression.
> > > > </dc:rights>
> > > > </rdf:Description>
> > > >
> > > > <rdf:Description rdf:about="#deDE_2">
> > > > <dc:creator>Walter</dc:creator>
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="de-DE">Zuordnung eines deutschen
> > > > RDFS Kommentars zu einem DC Term</dc:description>
> > > > <dc:description xml:lang="en-US">Association of a
> > > > German RDFS comment to a DC term</dc:description>
> > > > <dc:publisher>DCMI</dc:publisher>
> > > > <dc:rights xml:lang="de-DE">
> > > > Die publizierende Organisation uebernimmt keine
> > > > Gewaehr fuer die Richtigkeit der Zuordnung des deutschen Ausdrucks.
> > > > </dc:rights>
> > > > <dc:rights xml:lang="en-US">The publisher disclaims
> > > > any responsibility for the correctnes of the association
> > > > of the German expression.
> > > > </dc:rights>
> > > > </rdf:Description>
--
Dr. Thomas Baker [log in to unmask]
Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven mobile +49-171-408-5784
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft work +49-30-8109-9027
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
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