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dct:Language on Distribution

Published on: 13/03/2015 Discussion Archived

While a Dataset can have a dct:Language property ("This property can be repeated if there are multiple languages in the Dataset"), it seems that the Distribution cannot.

It would be useful to also have a dct:Language on Distribution: our statistics department, for instance, publishes spreadsheets in both Dutch and French, the only difference between them being the (translated) name of the columns. I would consider these files to be two Distributions of the same Dataset, and would like to be able to tell the difference without having to create two Datasets or to make ambiguous assumptions (like: if the dct:title only has a @fr, assume the dataset is also in FR, and never translate the Distribution title in other languages) 

Component

Documentation

Category

improvement

Comments

Makx DEKKERS
Makx DEKKERS Fri, 13/03/2015 - 22:46

Interestingly, this is exactly the recommendation that DCAT makes. In the Usage note for dct:language at http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/#Property:dataset_language: 

  • If the dataset is available in multiple languages, use multiple values for this property. If each language is available separately, define an instance of dcat:Distribution for each language and describe the specific language of each distribution using dct:language (i.e. the dataset will have multiple dct:language values and each distribution will have one of these languages as value of its dct:language property).
Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 27/04/2015 - 18:42