Add linguistic metadata, like localization information or the default language of the dataset.
Some linked data applications, like thesaurus, controlled vocabularies, etc. need to have a finer control on the linguistic terms that they are handling. They may need, for example, to express the linguistic relationship between two concepts or the language in which they are expressed.
Given that it is not possible to have literals as subjects in the RDF model, it is necessary to employ resources as literal representatives and to assert declarations between those resources.
spa
in ISO-693-3.
:CatedrĂ¡tico
lexvo:means wordnet:Professor ;
lexvo:language
<http://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/spa> .
This pattern exposes the semantic relationships between multilingual labels, so they can be connected with other resources.
Using the property lexvo:language
it is also possible to
declare the language of a dataset, so one can use the
Labels without language tag pattern.
However, this option is not a standard practice and users may not be aware
of those global declarations.
Although it has been proposed to add a property to declare the default language of a named graph in RDF 1.1, it was rejected.
In JSON-LD, it is possible to declare the default language of a given context.
The Lexvo project defines an ontology
of linguistic terms.
Lexvo proposes a general framework to publish multilingual knowledge bases.
For example, it declares a property language
and contains URIs for the different languages.
In this way, language declarations can be part of the RDF model as well as the relationships between terms.