RDF Literals and Base Directions

[iherman]

Find an appropriate solution to add the base direction (equivalent to HTML's dir attribute) to RDF's natural language literals.

[iherman]

This has been an issue that has plagued (and still does) many I18N reviews of Working Group documents that defined some sort of a vocabulary. These included (and includes) Web Annotation, Social Web, Web of Things, Publishing, JSON-LD, or Verifiable Claims. In short, while RDF has language literals (i.e., there is a possibility to add a BCP47 language tag to a string) there is no way to set a direction, and that meant that any vocabulary, say, for a Verifiable Credential, Publication Manifest, etc., can be properly internationalized. Half-baked solutions have been adopted, but none of them are satisfactory...

There have been discussions (e.g., around the i18n note on strings on the Web and recently an ad-hoc discussion round around a document listing the possible options, see also the meeting minutes on 2019-05-29 and 2019-06-05.

The conclusion of the discussion is two-fold:

1. The only clean solution is to go back to the basis and solve the issue in RDF. The proposal is to do this in a very focused and short-lived Working Group doing that and only that change in RDF.
2. Some intermediary measures, possibly looking forward to the outcome of the aforementioned working group, should be adopted in JSON-LD and, as a consequence, to VC and other documents.

[iherman]

Cc: @r12a @draggett @swickr @ashimura

[r12a]

Assuming that i didn't mess things up too badly, it may be useful to read w3c/rdf-dir-literal#7 (comment) to get some additional background.

[iherman]

There is now a draft charter on the repo: https://w3c.github.io/rdf-dir-literal/draft-charter.html

[iherman]

Advance notice sent to the AC and chairs:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/2019JulSep/0000.html

Also sent to other mailings list, e.g.,

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2019Jul/0003.html

[wseltzer]

Alternate work mode proposed

[iherman]

There has been a breakout session at TPAC. This led the JSON-LD WG to re-open the issue of adding base direction to JSON-LD 1.1. On its F2F meeting at TPAC, the JSON-LD WG has accepted a series of resolutions, see the minutes of Thursday and Friday for the details.

The essence is: JSON-LD 1.1 will introduce a new keyword @direction that can be used, essentially, the same way as @language: can be part of the context to denote a global (i.e., default) value, and can also be used as part of an individual literal.

The mapping to RDF will have, for now, several options to the user: dropping direction altogether, generate a literal using a special datatype, or generate a compound blank node with the relevant terms. The RDF community may pick one of these solutions and standardize it. Until then this issue can be considered as parked.

[iherman]

What has been described in the JSON-LD editors' drafts