[eml-dev] [Bug 585] - internationalization needed in EML

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585


jones at nceas.ucsb.edu changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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   Target Milestone|Postpone                    |EML2.2.0




------- Comment #3 from jones at nceas.ucsb.edu  2008-12-08 10:33 -------
David and I discussed (briefly) some of these issues at ISEI.  And we also
discussed them at the ILTER meeting in China.  The 'language' tag in
eml-resource defines the language of the resource, which in the case of
eml-dataset resources means the language of the data.  Interestingly, we don't
really have a language tag per se for the EMl document itself, except that all
XML documents can use the built-in "xml:lang" attribute, which is optional for
all XML elements (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag).  This allows one
to set the language for each and every element in an XML document, such as:

<title xml:lang="en">North American Forests</title>
<title xml:lang="es">Bosques de Norte Americano</title>

Two problems we would need to address with this approach come immedately to
mind:

1) Many elements in EML are not repeatable, and therefore it is not possible to
have one copy of the element in English and another in a different language. So
cardinality would have to be updated throughout the EML schemas, which would
make some aspects of validation more confusing.
2) For those elements that are already repeatable or are made repatable through
a revision, there is no mechanism to indicate that the two element nodes are
meant to be have the same semantic meaning in different languages, as opposed
to two semantically different elements that happen to also differ in their
language.

This second issue is the one that would require more structural changes to EML.
 For example, one might sometimes want to have more than one title (which is
why title is currently repeatable), but other times want to have one title in
two different languages.  Either way, EML's current structures don't allow
these subtleties to be specified.

Matt