technical issues for vocabs: xml:lang and which skos:*Note tag to use

[Alasdair Gray]

Alasdair J G Gray
Research Associate: Explicator Project
http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk
Computer Science, University of Glasgow
0141 330 6292


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-semantics at eso.org [mailto:owner-semantics at eso.org] On Behalf
Of Douglas Burke
Sent: 26 November 2007 15:15
To: semantics at ivoa.net
Subject: technical issues for vocabs: xml:lang and which skos:*Note tag
to use


Two questions below, which I probably should have sent in different
emails.

Doug

A) use of xml:lang attributes

Rick's IVOA thesaurus (as do the vocabs from Explicator) includes 
entries like

<skos:Concept rdf:about="#accretionDisks">
   <skos:prefLabel>accretion disks</skos:prefLabel>
   <skos:definition>accretion discs        UK</skos:definition>
   <skos:definition>accretion disks</skos:definition>
   ...

I think it would be good to add xml:lang attributes, so in this case 
we'd have

   <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">accretion disks</skos:prefLabel>
   <skos:definition xml:lang="en-GB">accretion discs</skos:definition>
   <skos:definition xml:lang="en">accretion disks</skos:definition>


Or, if I actually read http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/ then we'd have

<rdf:RDF .... xml:lang="en">
...
   <skos:prefLabel>accretion disks</skos:prefLabel>
   <skos:definition xml:lang="en-GB">accretion discs</skos:definition>
   <skos:definition>accretion disks</skos:definition>

Is there any reason why we shouldn't add this to the vocabs?

[AG] In fact, if you read the SKOS Core Guide you will find that there
is a section about using multilingual labels and it uses your suggested
xml:lang attributes. On my behalf it was sheer laziness or oversight
that they are not included at the moment. I will edit my generating
script to add these in for the AOIM, A&A and UCD vocabularies.

Alasdair

b) what skos:*Note should be used?

Rick's IVOA thesaurus uses skos:scopeNote for adding "extra" 
information. The skos guide at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-skos-core-guide/#secdocumentation suggests we 
should split this up and use one of

  skos:scopeNote
  skos:historyNote
  skos:editorialNote
  skos:changeNote

I can go through and produce a first draft for this (ie how I feel the 
labels should be placed) if that would be useful.