SkosCoreGuideToc/SectionMultilingual

Multilingual Concept Schemes

To describe the languages covered by a multilingual concept scheme, you can use the dc:language property, for example:

<rdf:RDF  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
          xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
          xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
          xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
         
  <skos:ConceptScheme rdf:about="http://my.example.org/thesaurus">
    <!-- Other properties of the concept scheme ... -->
    <dc:language>
      <dcterms:RFC1766>
        <rdf:value>EN</rdf:value>
        <rdfs:label>English</rdfs:label>
      </dcterms:RFC1766>
    </dc:language>
    <dc:language>
      <dcterms:RFC1766>
        <rdf:value>FR</rdf:value>
        <rdfs:label>French</rdfs:label>
      </dcterms:RFC1766>
    </dc:language>
    <!-- Other languages etc. -->
  </skos:ConceptScheme>

</rdf:RDF>

Multilingual Labelling

A concept may be assigned labels from more than one language. For example (adapted from HPMULTI [ref]):

<rdf:RDF  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
          xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#">

  <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://my.example.org/thesaurus/advertising#concept">
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Advertising</skos:prefLabel>
    <skos:altLabel xml:lang="en">Publicity</skos:altLabel>
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fr">Publicité</skos:prefLabel>
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="da">Annoncering</skos:prefLabel>
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="ne">Reclame</skos:prefLabel>
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fi">Mainonta</skos:prefLabel>
    <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="ge">Werbung</skos:prefLabel>
  </skos:Concept>

</rdf:RDF>

The xml:lang attribute can be used as defined by [ref].

Note that the multilingual labelling method ignores the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) distinctions in meaning that are embedded in a particular language. If you want to capture these subtleties, you will need to use the inter-lingual mapping method [ref], where a separate set of concepts is defined for each language component of the thesaurus, and mappings are defined between the components.

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