Multilingual Linked Open Data Patterns

No language negotiation

Description

Return always the same triples without taking into account the HTTP Accept-language header.

Context

RDF is meant for machines which are natural language agnostic, so ignoring the language preferences seems a reasonable option.

This pattern can be employed when the amount of multilingual data is manageable and there are no big constraints on datasets consumers.

Discussion

Implementations that always return the same data could be considered more consistent.

Ignoring the Accept-language header and returning all the information available for a given resource seems a valid solution for software agents that will select the triples that are of interest to their end-users.

With this pattern the data representation of a resource offered is independent of the language preferences, so there is no need to care about semantic equivalence of textual information.

However, localized client applications may receive unnecessary triples that could create a computation and network overhead. This overhead could have an impact in low computation and bandwidth devices such as smart-phones and sensors.

See also

This is the opposite pattern to Language Content Negotiation