[okfn-help] Language metadata in CKAN?

Tue Jan 5 23:46:05 GMT 2010

A few thoughts on language metadata in CKAN...

  * I think a standard field for language of resource in CKAN might be
useful. Perhaps based on ISO 639 or similar? Most obviously useful for
corpora - such as collections of texts, dictionaries and so on, but
I'm sure there are many more potential uses of this field. We are
already starting to use 'language-' tags.
  * What about information on the language of the package description
(and so on) in CKAN? E.g. we might have a whole new bunch of packages
from de.ckan.net that we wish to  add to ckan.net. We may wish to have
basic metadata the same (short name, URL, license, etc.) but different
translations of the description. While I'm sure this could be
approached on a case by case basis in the first instance (soon we will
have material in English and German - later possibly in French,
Finnish, Swedish, ...) in the longer term it may make sense to think
about how we can deal more systematically with package descriptions in
different languages. My guess is English will continue to be the main
language of CKAN, but worth thinking about how CKAN can be a truly
multilingual resource in future.
  * This more a hypothetical question than an immediate concern - but
any thoughts about translating tags? I would imagine for a number of
reasons this would be totally non-trivial.

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org