Best Practices/Make the data available in the language people want it

Title

Make the data available in the language people want it.

Short description

Data should available in the language people want to reuse it in order to maximize the reuse of the data.

Why

If data is available in language of the re-users it makes the data usable by a larger community of people.

Intended Outcome

People speaking different languages can access the data in their native language.

Relationship to PSI Directive

(1) Benefits to the knowledge economy.

(3) Development of new services based on novel ways to combine and make use of such information, stimulate economic growth and promote social engagement.

(5) To create new services and applications, which are built upon the use, aggregation or combination of data.

Possible Approach

Recommended practices:

• Use agreed upon vocabularies
• Use RDF as a standardized language for description of resources
• Use standardized technologies – LD stack, SPARQL
• Provide standardized APIs
• Provide links to other resources

Common understanding of concepts needs to be achieved. One of the possible approaches is to develop common vocabularies. Both universal and domain specific vocabularies are necessary.

Do not include language labels in (persistent) URIs.

Apply best practices for provision of the multilingual data. See for example BPMLOD Community Group.

Additional recommendations:

• Properly licence datasets
• Provide provenance metadata
• Use language resources

How to Test

Check the number of languages the labels are provided in the datasets. Check if the content negotiation works on the server. Check if the common vocabularies are reused.

Evidence

EUROVOC thesaurus

Language resources available at the Linguistic LD Observatory (Linghub).

Tags

multilingualism, linked data, vocabularies, URI

Status

Draft

Intended Audience

Re-users, linked data producers