[openbiblio-dev] BibJSON and multiple languages

Wed Mar 7 16:01:07 UTC 2012

My only concern about making usual data elements into objects is that it adds a level of complexity that many (most?) users won't encounter. Wouldn't make sense to keep things as simple as possible? This is one thing that has driven me nuts in the past when dealing with some RDF data (e.g., having to specify a language code when all I want is a text field).

I like the idea of a lang_alternate key. On the one hand it may be less general than making all relevant fields objects, but it avoids asking developers using JSON to deal with complexity that they might not want or have.

Regards

Rod 

On 7 Mar 2012, at 15:44, Jim Pitman wrote:

> Mark MacGillivray <mark at odaesa.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Roderic, thanks for contacting us, this is really interesting
> 
> Yes. This is an important issue not yet addressed in BibJSON.
> 
>>> I often come across articles in multiple
>>> languages (e.g., the article, abstract, and body of the text is in
>>> Portuguese, but an English title and abstract are also provided). 
> 
> Yes. Important use case we should accommodate. 
> The most common use case is a translated title, then a translated abstract.
> I can provide plenty of data like this in mathematics.
> I think the right solution is to allow any of the usual data elements e.g. title,  abstract, ...
> to become an object, and to enhance those objects in a way that indicates what is the original title,
> what is its language, what are alternate titles, what languages, who translated them, ....
> Hopefully there is some available standard we could adopt for this purpose.
> 
> Main point is, whatever we do, we should be doing the same thing in each field: title,  abstract, journal, ...
> and that should include author objects as well, especially e.g. for transformation of chinese and cyrillic characters.
> 
>> OR perhaps a better, more extensible approach, but more complex, would
>> be to use the JSON-LD method of specifying languages:
>> http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld-syntax/#default-language
> 
> Great if JSON-LD can take care of this.
> 
>> We are currently leaning towards adopting JSON-LD methods for doing
>> namespaces, so any JSON-LD methods for languages could also be acceptable.
> 
> Sounds right.
> --Jim
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Jim Pitman
> Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
> University of California
> 367 Evans Hall # 3860
> Berkeley, CA 94720-3860
> 
> ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
> e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
> URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman
> 

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
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Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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