[eml-dev] xml:lang attribute for title in EML 2.1.0

[Inigo San Gil]

We'll keep our eyes on the ball, then.

Meanwhile others have adopted their own solution.
Here are two examples:
1) a site from Spain reports this implementation

<title>[Language:En]Snow cover data provided by MODIS satellite imagery</title>
<title>[Language:Sp]Datos de innivaci&#243;n seg&#250;n im&#225;genes MODIS</title>

We thought that the use of the XML attribute "lang=en | sp"
was interesting -but, among other problems,  we would  have
gotten screwed by eml-dev eventual internationalization
implementation.  Call it luck, but you can bet the "eventual
eml-dev decision" would force us to re-code the EML
generation.

2) From Taiwan, it is also a mix and match.  I had the
internationalization conversation years ago, when we set
harvesting into the NBII clearinghouse.  at the TFRI, we
found EML documents that have a hybrid of english and
chinese, with no sign or whatsoever of the language used.
We had to devise a mechanism to detect language.  We
simply did not harvest those docs whose critical content
was not translated in English.

ILTER discussed (two years ago?) some guidelines on
how the different countries were going to deal with the
tower of Babel problem.  May be you can look into those
if you feel curious, but if I recall correctly, it went along
the lines of encoding the metadata in the native language,
and produce some discovery-level EML in English. This
strategy would create two EMLs per EML..

Sparks or not, I still have to recommend the EML users
to implement some solution. Im inclined to suggest  that
such solution 1) does not break the current EML rules.
2) The solution should allow for easy language detection.
Spain's case fits here, for example.

Cheers, inigo




On 9/16/2010 10:56 AM, ben leinfelder wrote:
> Hi Markus,
> I'm afraid your findings are accurate with respect to the xml:lang attribute in the<title>  element (or any "NonEmptyStringType" element).
> In the course of my experimentation with allowing backwards-compatible internationalization with a new EML version (2.1.1) I did have to include the "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" namespace just as you did and also declare the xml:lang attribute in elements where I wanted to employ it.
> While certain EML elements are repeatable, it's not always clear what the presence of multiple elements represent (are they translations in different languages or are they alternate titles?). In order to clarify this confusion and also allow multiple translations for non-repeatable elements I proposed a solution for allowing mixed element content for fields that should be internationalized. There's a fairly comprehensive discussion of this approach in our eml-dev archives: http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/pipermail/eml-dev/2010-July/001828.html
> I didn't get a lot of decisive feedback and so have not moved forward with releasing an updated EML version. Hopefully this thread will again set the ball rolling.
> -ben
> .nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/eml-dev