Subject: Swedish Tourist Board terms

From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 16:58:07 +0200

Cross posting to iCal / RDF-dev mailing lists.

I thought I could share with you this first collection of tourist industry
naming conventions from the Swedish National Tourist Board.  There is a lot
of work to be done on it, before it becomes an RDF schema translation map.

We are working feverishly to get it into a workable structure before it is
presented to a gathering of European tourist Orgs in Brussels on the 21st of
this month.

We would like anyone's opinion on the following matter:

Our original intention was to use English as a metadata vocabulary.  Any
language group wishing to map their language to the schema could do so
against the English list.  But in viewing the current Swedish - English map,
we already see lots of semantic incompatibilities.

The other possibility that might be more appealing to some non-English
speaking nationalities,  is giving each term a code number - like Dewey
Decimal.  This would let each language choose which other language they
would like to map against.  But this could cause more ambivalence

Time is short since this is supposed to be up and running in Europe to the
end of the year.

Greg FitzPatrick
SKiCal WG

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From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 19:48:04 +0200

--On mån 6 sep 1999 16.58 +0200 Greg FitzPatrick <[email-masked]> wrote:

> against the English list.  But in viewing the current Swedish - English
> map, we already see lots of semantic incompatibilities.

My take in all of these cases when "translation of schema elements" are
discussed, I strongly ask the people to differ between what is presented to
the user, and what is used in the schema. What is used in the schema should
NOT be displayed to the user.

Translation of schema elements have happened in the PH directory protocol,
and that has showed that translation of schema elements is a bad thing.

So, be careful for what you ask for.

   Patrik
   Speaking out of experience, and not as Area Director at _this_ stage

---

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 23:11:29 +0200

> and that has showed that translation of schema elements is a bad thing.

A clearification of this I wrote:

You should be extremely careful with what you translate. In the PH protocol
for example, a record could have basically any format, such as:

Name: Patrik
Email: [email-masked]

In some countries, one wanted to translate this to for example swedish. The
result was the following:

Namn: Patrik
E-Postadress: [email-masked]

I.e. translating what is to be parsed by a computer in a mechanical
algorithm is bad. Those things can be parsed anyways, and translated in the
user interface if needed.

    Patrik

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From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1999 09:13:20 +0200

I agree completely - and the SkiCal properties are all in English just as
the iCal RFC2445  properties are.

I will restate the problem as such.  The Swedish National Tourist Board is
going to present a thesaurus to the European Tourist Board.

Some European Tourist agencies are expected to resent English being used as
the "mother of all tongues".  There are linguistic inconsistencies in
mapping everything to English.

We don't want to start tagging with numbers - or do we?

Thanks for your input.

Greg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On
> Behalf Of Patrik Fältström
> Sent: den 6 september 1999 23:11
> To: Patrik Fältström; Greg FitzPatrick; Rdf-Dev@Mailbase. Ac. Uk;
> 'Ietf-Calendar@Imc. Org'
> Subject: Re: Swedish Tourist Board terms
>
>

---

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 09:21:40 +0200

> the iCal RFC2445  properties are.

[removed some information]

> Some European Tourist agencies are expected to resent English being used
> as the "mother of all tongues".  There are linguistic inconsistencies in

What you say in these two paragraphs is that (1) the properties will be in
english and (2) there is a strong opposition to that, so many people will
start translating the properties?

IF it is the case that people don't understand what a property is used for,
then it is not described clearly enough. A property don't have it's
function described only by the name itself. See the DublinCore discussions.

   paf