There’s a problem I encountered some time ago, and then more or less forgot about, but other people are having similar challenges so I thought I’d try to articulate it.<\/p>\n
(if you know RDF well you can just skip this section)<\/p>\n
The RDF way of structuring data allows you say several things about that string. The most simple version says nothing, it’s just a list of characters:<\/p>\n
\"Hello\"<\/pre>\nThen you can assign one of the common XML style datatypes:<\/p>\n
\"Hello\"^^xsd:string .<\/pre>\n\"23\"^^xsd:positiveInteger .<\/pre>\n\"1969-05-23\"^^xsd:date .<\/pre>\nThe bit after the ^^ can actually be any URI, so you can have<\/p>\n
\"2342A-1.3\"^^\r\n <http:\/\/example.org\/vocab\/vendtechtron-product-serial-number> .<\/pre>\n(nb. a lot of things which are identifiers get called a “number” which really are just a string of characters).<\/p>\n
The final variation is a bit weird. You can indicate that a string is text in a given language. eg.<\/p>\n
\"Hello!\"@en .<\/pre>\n\"Bonjour!\"@fr .<\/pre>\nAnd also specific variations of languages, such as<\/p>\n
\"Hi, parner!\"@en-us .<\/pre>\n\"Wotchamate!\"@en-gb .<\/pre>\nYou are not allowed to set both a language and datatype on a single literal so.<\/p>\n
“XYZ”\u00a0 or “XYZ”@en or “XYZ”^^<http:\/\/foo.com\/bar> are all legal but “XYZ”@en^^xsd:string is not.<\/p>\n
I’ve never really understood why the designers didn’t use defined datatypes for languages, eg.<\/p>\n
\"Hello\"^^<http:\/\/w3c.org\/ns\/lang\/en> .<\/pre>\nI’m sure that internally most RDF systems probably optimise datatype & lang to be a single variable internally.<\/p>\n
Other dialects<\/h3>\n
The problem with this very simple attitude to language is that it misses how subdivided dialects can become. For example<\/p>\n
University X has a thing they do which we’ll describe as “a unit of education for which a student may enroll, for a fee, and may receive an award”. They call it a “course”.<\/p>\n
University Y doesn’t have courses, it has “presentations”, however semantically it’s the same thing.<\/p>\n
We can easily define a URI for this class, say <http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> but I want a way to describe the label appropriate for university X users and university Y users.<\/p>\n
Option 0: Ignore the problem or enforce a national standard<\/h4>\n
Included but not really an option because THIS IS NOT THE WEBBY WAY! The web works because it can cope with the fact different systems don’t all work exactly the same way, but can still link up.<\/p>\n
Option 1: Separate label datasets<\/h4>\n
I could provide each university with a local terms file to include, but that’s a bit of a disaster as they can’t safely merge their data.<\/p>\n
eg. University Y gets a dataset with data like:<\/p>\n
<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> rdfs:label “Presentation”.<\/p>\n
Option 2: Invent datatypes for these dialects<\/h4>\n
<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> rdfs:label \r\n \"Course\"^^<http:\/\/id.uni-x.ac.uk\/vocab\/our-way-of-describing-stuff>.\r\n\r\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> rdfs:label \r\n \"Presentation\"^^<http:\/\/id.y.ac.uk\/vocab\/term-in-our-dialect>.<\/pre>\nI guess this isn’t too bad, but it’s not very intuitive.<\/p>\n
Option 3: Invent our own language codes<\/h4>\n
<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> rdfs:label \r\n \"Course\"@en-uni-x .\r\n\r\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> rdfs:label \r\n \"Presentation\"@en-uni-y .<\/pre>\nThis is going to break things somewhere. I wouldn’t recommend it.<\/p>\n
Option 4: Model it in RDF<\/h4>\n
We could actually assign a URI (or blank node) to the concept of the label and then use the RDF structure to explain the difference.<\/p>\n
<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> dialect:label \r\n <http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit#label> .<\/pre>\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit#label> a \r\n dialect:DialectSpecificText .\r\n\r\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit#label> \r\n dialect:text \"Presentation\"@en .<\/pre>\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit#label> \r\n dialect:inDialect <http:\/\/id.y.ac.uk\/vocab\/our-dialect> .<\/pre>\nThis is sorta elegant until anybody tries to actually use your data.<\/p>\n
Option 5: Use a predicate for each dialect<\/h4>\n
<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> dialects:labelForX\r\n \"Course\" .\r\n<http:\/\/example.com\/vocab\/EnrollableLearningUnit> dialects:labelForY\r\n \"Presentation\"<\/pre>\nThis would certainly work, but it’s ugly and would make consuming the data fiddly.<\/p>\n
Which option?<\/h3>\n
I have no clue. That’s why I’m writing this blog post. Labels (and descriptions) aimed at different audiences is not something I’ve yet seen done nicely in RDF.<\/p>\n
This problem isn’t going to go away any time soon. At Southampton,w hat our students call “a degree” or “course” (eg. 3 Year BSc Computer Science”, the student admin are more likely to call a “programme theme”, and the underlying database is US-made so calls it “MAJOR”.<\/p>\n
As a community we need to solve this at some point as there really is a good reason for audience specific labels and descriptions beyond simple national language variations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a problem I encountered some time ago, and then more or less forgot about, but other people are having similar challenges so I thought I’d try to articulate it. A bit of background about RDF literals (if you know RDF well you can just skip this section) The RDF way of structuring data allows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rdf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1053,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}