ITS WG Collaborative editing page

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Status: Initial Draft ie. please focus on technical content, rather than wordsmithing at this stage.

Author: Naoyuki Nomura

Usage Case: Running Server Software in Multilingual Environment

Description

[CL] I am somewhat unclear whether this scenario works more along the lines of "applications insert ITS markup" (eg. when serializing database content), or "applications process ITS markup" (eg. switch the language of a UI based on the language of a particular content processed through the UI).

[CL] ***

[CL] I see quite some overlap between this usage scenario and the general architecture for a distributed, multilingual application. Thus, I would be in favour of being specific about one particular aspect of such an application that could be enabled/improved by means of the ITS.

[FS] I think Richard already mentioned that the i18n-core wg is doing work on internationalization of web services, which might be the more adequate place of discussion for this topic.

Customer benefits of digital office equipments tend to be multiplied by being networked as Metcalfe's Law indicates. The more business organizations go through globalization process, the more multilingual functionalities are required of such equipments and intranet server software.

End users should be able to use their own languages to perform their own tasks, and yet are required to write emails in foreign languages or write some documents in more than one languages. When they send electronic documents to the printer or faxing machine, the control panel of such equipment would automatically switch into their native language, whereas any intermediate server software, any middleware or Web Service engines have to process the internationalized contents without any problem.

System integrators would be able to use ITS tag set effortlessly in order to let various sort of language mixture appropriately processed by XSLT engine or any other database middleware. Some database engines would take advantage of ITS tags to appropriately process the partial contents of the XML document record that consists of more than one languages. ITS tags may sometimes trigger looking up bilingual dictionaries to consistently translate the words stored in a field of database records.

There could be some challenges in server software that incoporates workflow management system, which is supposed to generate tasks at each node of the workflow in different languages and yet has to keep the integrity of the workflow. Not only the words, but also some security related constraints that vary across countries may have to be appropriately applied to each nodes triggered by referring to ITS tags.

More ordinary server software, would require switching from language to language, or serving multiple language clients at the same time. ITS based profile should have to be referred to on the fly, especially in case the server software is required to be free from restarting the program and yet is capable of switching among languages or supporting new language that was added upon request by a new user.

Stakeholders

This scenario relates to the developers of networked digital office equipments and server software. IT infrastructure architects in solution provider companies should also pay attention to ITS for designing multilingual intranet contents service environment. Database engineers among others should be aware of the appropriate location to place ITS profile -- inside DB engine, within the middleware, outside the DBMS, or more like in distributed manner. In case ITS tags are embedded in the contents themselves, contents creators and CMS designers are required to design the structure of the XML documents in which ITS tags are used.