Re: bibliographic issues

From: Eric Miller <em_at_w3.org>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 13:15:49 -0400

On Aug 2, 2005, at 11:44 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

>
> On Aug 2, 2005, at 11:12 AM, Eric Miller wrote:
>
>
>> Solutions for 'english only' are a non-starter. I'm curious if you
>> think the following example would capture these requirements.
>>
>> <foaf:Person rdf:about = "&foo;">
>> <foaf:name xml:lang="jp">杉本重雄</foaf:name>
>> <foaf:name>Shigeo Sugimoto</foaf:name>
>> <foaf:givenname>Shigeo</foaf:givenname>
>> <foaf:surname>Sugimoto</foaf:surname>
>> </foaf:Person>
>>
>
> Since I publish in English and very rarely deal with anything else,
> I'm not sure. I only know enough to know it's an important issue.
> Will see if I can track down someone who knows more about this sort
> thing.

Please do.

More background.... a similar if not identical discussion happened
several (7?) years ago in the DCMI community around multi-lingual
representation, describing people / expressing names, etc. While I
believe the work done by the RDF community addresses most if not all
of the technical use-cases presented at that time. If you have some
additional use cases from your recent talk, however, I'd be
interested in hearing these.

> What I wonder about is pretty basic international stuff, like how
> would software know how to deal with a name like Mao Zedong. IIRC,
> Mao is the family name, so presumably (?) also the primary sort
> key. OK, if that's right, no problem at this point. But what if
> you have a rule that says that the reference list should list
> authors in sort order like so:
>
> Doe, J.
>
> How will the software know how to correctly sort and format Mao?
> If the primary name is mandarin, then it should be formatted as
> is? But then how do you know which is the primary name and which
> is transliterated? I'd almost want to add a transliteratedName
> property.

I'm not sure I follow why you'd want or need this property. If I'm a
japanese cataloger, which is the transliteratedName, the english
one? I'd argue neither, they're simply the same "name" in different
languages.

In your above example, you seem to be asking for a sort algorithm to
be performed based on particular properties and particular languages.
This makes sense, but I don't quite see the need for a special
property per se for this, but rather a property / language pair. In
the case above, you'd ideally like japanese (or other) translations
associated with the properties givenname, surname as well.

> But as I said, I'm hardly an expert in these matters. I just raise
> the questions because they need raising.

Agreed. If you think the above arguments holds, however, I'd like to
get back to the simple step of at least having the content providers
(and you / your scripts) agree on a common core set of properties for
describing people.

--
eric miller                              http://www.w3.org/people/em/
semantic web activity lead               http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
w3c world wide web consortium            http://www.w3.org/
Received on Tue Aug 02 2005 - 17:12:26 EDT

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