Automating multilingual metadata vocabularies

Abstract

Markup is based on mnemonics (i.e. element names, attribute names and attribute values). These mnemonics have meaning, being this one of the most interesting features of markup. Human understanding of this meaning is lost when the encoder doesn’t have a good command of the language the mnemonics are based on. By "multilingual markup" we refer to the use of tags built with mnemonics in one’s own language, but still following the rules of the original markup vocabulary. In this paper we show the benefits of using multilingual markup vocabularies, especially in large digital library projects, and we describe our work to automate the use of multilingual vocabularies, including the translation of DC to Catalan, French, German and Spanish.