Multilingual Linked Open Data Patterns

Localize existing vocabularies

Description

Enrich existing vocabularies with local translations.

Context

Localized applications that need to represent information in their local languages from external vocabularies that are not localized can define their own translations.

Example

A linked data application in Spanish may use the Dublin Core vocabulary to indicate the contributors of a given work. The end-user should see the labels in his own language. To that end, one can add a localized label to dc:contributor as:

dc:contributor  rdfs:label  "Colaborador"@es .

Discussion

A multilingual linked data application could transparently select the tagged literal corresponding to dc:contributor in its preferred language.

Polluting well known vocabularies with localized literals may be controversial and should be handled with caution.

See also

This pattern follows the Anyone-can-say-Anything-about-Any-topic (AAA) lemma[Alleman 10].

This pattern can be considered a special case of the Annotation pattern which says that it is entirely consistent with the Linked Data principles to make statements about third-party resources.