[IPT] requesting a feature for posting elements written in regional language

[Burke Chih-Jen Ko]

Hi Tim,

Following what I briefly mentioned in the e-Biosphere, here I describe  
it to hopefully make it more comprehensive.

Now we TaiBIF are doing data cleaning against our specimen data, one  
of the tasks is to separate information written in different  
languages. Take 'Locality' as an example, if an attribute is 'Taipei 台 
北', we move '台北' to a separate column named 'LocalityInChinese'.  
(Considering easiness for data providers, we decided to use  
'InChinese' instead of 'zh_TW'.)

Then you see several descriptive elements in Darwin Core could have  
their counterparts in Chinese, like Collector, Identifier, and many  
others. To be used by regional data providers, IPT will be even better  
if it can handle multiple languages. Actually we had thought about  
just keep all languages in one place, but I am afraid that it might  
create problems when information is exchanging worldwide.

As I am aware that language issues could lead to further discussions  
of the standard, I, therefore, propose a neutral mechanism that users  
can add their own elements, so that once an element is created, it can  
automatically map to the column with the same name, when a SQL source  
is connected or a csv sheet is uploaded. There should also be  
statistics based on the new element, or users can decide they don't  
want it calculated. In this case, I would add 'LocalityInChinese' as  
the new element.

Hope this make sense.

Cheers,

Chih-Jen(Burke)