How should language be used in RDF mapping?

[iherman]

The metadata may include a language tag, that is for the content of the data. How does this translate into RDF? Proposal:

• If the content of the cell is not datatyped, and is not a URI, and the language tag's value is not "en", then the generated object should be a language literal with the global language tag set.

(Seems fairly uncontroversial, I put this as a possible entry to decide right away.)

[danbri]

Are there precedents (in CSV standards or W3C in general) for special-casing "en" in this way?

[danbri]

discussion: See http://www.w3.org/2014/11/12-csvw-irc#T15-18-27

[iherman]

Well... In HTML, if the language tag is not set, the language is considered to be in English...

But, indeed, we can leave that to the author. It is true, isn't it, that the language setting is not required in the metadata? If that is the case, we can use this: if there is no language setting, the output can be plain literal, and language literal otherwise.

Ivan

[6a6d74]

Discussed in meeting 12-Nov-2014 (Minutes); summary ...

RESOLUTION: for RDF mapping, apply locale / language tag from metadata to all literal string values in output

RESOLUTION: for (plain old) JSON mapping, no locale information is added to the JSON output - we assume that people will look at the complimentary metadata for locale information

We agreed that for the 'plain old JSON' mapping, we don't include locale information because we want it to be as simple as possible. If people want locale, then they should use the RDF mapping & JSON-LD syntax.

Finally, we noted that if you want to say a particular locale for plain old json, you might say "property_en" or "property_fr". This mechanism could be used to distinguish between columns that confer the same property but in different languages. The 2-letter country code suffix gives a human readable hint.

We agreed not to implement anything regarding assumptions about "en" locale/language.

Issue not closed because the Mapping doc is not yet updated.

[6a6d74]

csv2rdf doc updated as per resolution.