[MOBY-dev] xml:lang explored

[Paul Gordon]

I will reiterate that I think the language of the text should be noted 
in the database somewhere, but that we shouldn't support multi-liguality 
for a single entry (that's too much work).  While we can pressure people 
into using English for the public central registry, I see no reason to 
force English on a boutique registry in Botswana (for example) just 
because we were too lazy to program in an extra column in the DB.  I am 
also thinking about the potential usefulness of Moby outside of science...

Mark Wilkinson wrote:
> personally, I tend to think we *should* be using the multi-lingual 
> capabilities of XML more than we are!  The idea is not to introduce a 
> tower of Babel, but rather to embrace as many languages as possible in 
> our infrastructure!  to be inclusive, rather than exclusive!
>
> this does, however, require extensive re-tooling of the software.  I 
> wonder if it is something that is best left for Moby 2.0 (and planned 
> from the start) rather than hacked into Moby 1.0?
>
> M
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 26 May 2008 15:41:34 -0700, Pieter Neerincx 
> <pieter.neerincx at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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