[MOBY-dev] xml:lang explored

[Pieter Neerincx]

Hi all,

On 26 May 2008, at 20:59, Paul Gordon wrote:

> I think we are mostly polyglots on this list,

I'm a polyglot when I'm on holiday or in a pub maybe, but when I'm  
talking bioinformatics stuff I'm a strict monoglot! Before we open  
that can of worms: do we actually need translations? Did anyone  
request support for different languages? Mark mentioned someone did on  
the last developer meeting, but I didn't see anyone chime in on this  
list with a request for other languages. I only noticed a few objects  
and services in the official public Central containing descriptions in  
Spanish (or is it Portugese?), which renders them useless for the  
majority of users.

BioMoby web services are all about creating interoperable resources.  
Introducing the Tower of Babel effect isn't going to help. I hope I  
don't sound arrogant, but unless there are scientists out there using  
BioMoby for research into language itself, archeology or culture, I  
really fail to see why we need anything but the "de facto" standard  
language for research. (No, I'm not a native Englisch speaker...)

Is there actually any major bioinformatics resource that supports  
translations? I can't think of any, but maybe I should write an e-mail  
to the NCBI, DDBJ, EBI et al. and request Dutch translations of  
Genbank, PubMed, KEGG, Uniprot, Ensembl, etc. Might be fun to see if  
and how they repsond :)...

> but for the sake of technical simplicity, I'd stick with just  
> tracking the language rather than having multiple values in the  
> registry.

For even more simplicity I'd opt for hardcoding the language to  
English. Now let's hope the native English speakers are not going to  
fight over whether international English means Australian, UK,  
American, Canadian, or yet another English. If that happens I'm voting  
for Dinglish :).

Just my € 0.02

Cheers,

Pi

>  Multilingual descriptions could be offloaded to the LSID metadata  
> perhaps if people really want it.
>
> Mes 0.02$ canadiens,
>
> Paul
>
> Mark Wilkinson wrote:
>> Should we allow registration of objects, service-types and  
>> namespaces in foreign languages also?  If so, then we need to re- 
>> think the entire way we manage the ontology, and assign unique id  
>> numbers to each node, where the rdf:label of the node can have  
>> multiple languages, rather than having the node named by its label.
>>
>> ...can... worms... but it's probably the "right thing to do"...
>>
>> M
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 26 May 2008 00:21:23 -0700, Jason Stewart <jason.e.stewart at gmail.com 
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>> Here's what I have found out.
>>>
>>> I don't believe that changing the current parser for Central.pm is
>>> going to help the situation. I have looked and besides special API's
>>> like the one implemented by LibXML::Reader, the application is  
>>> always
>>> required to maintain the status of xml:lang using the standard SAX  
>>> and
>>> DOM API's - for Java or for Perl.
>>>
>>> We will have to preserve the information in the DB, so a decision
>>> needs to be made on what level the xml:lang should be used - only  
>>> for
>>> descriptions?? or for the whole registration?? At the moment I don't
>>> see any reason to use it for more than the description - how do  
>>> people
>>> feel about this? Changing this should require adding one column to  
>>> the
>>> DB.
>>>
>>> Finally, do we want registration with multiple descriptions? That  
>>> will
>>> probably require a significant change in the DB - a new table for
>>> linking descriptions to registrations. Are people happy about that?
>>>
>>> Cheers, jas.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> MOBY-dev mailing list
>>> MOBY-dev at lists.open-bio.org
>>> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/moby-dev
>>
>>
>>
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