Names and languages in ROR

[Steve Canham]

Hi all 

I have several questions about the names in ROR, and the use of language codes in particular. They are:

1. Why does ROR need language codes? It seems an inherently ‘good thing’ to have that additional information, and it’s often interesting to know the language of a name, but what are the use cases where language codes are necessary?

   If ROR continues to have language codes...(I hope they do)

2. How does ROR deal with those names that are brands rather than descriptive names, and which therefore don’t have a language? At the moment they seem to be left uncoded, but should the distinction be made explicit?

3. The distribution of non English names in ROR, across different languages, is very uneven and appears ad hoc, presumably a result of the usage of names within affiliation strings. But – depending on use cases – should there be a planned policy around names in specific languages?

4. Names in non-Latin scripts are fascinating but generally are restricted to a portion of the names from the countries that use the script. If ROR is ever to be used in non-Latin scripted countries, is a more deliberate policy needed?

5. Is the current use of two letter iso codes to indicate the language sufficient?

6. Should the ‘ROR name’ always be the name the organisation calls itself, e.g. on its website? Or the name with the most usage in affiliations? Or what?

7. Should all organisations have a name in English? Not instead of, but in addition to a name in the language(s) local to the organisation.

8. Does the current split between labels, aliases, and acronyms make much sense any more? Could it be replaced by a simpler listing of ‘names’ (one of which would be designated as the principal name on the ROR card)?

9. Why don’t acronyms, for the most part, have a language code?

Most of these questions boil down to: What is the long term strategy for managing organisation names in ROR? I appreciate ROR is extremely busy, with the team considering and processing many requests and a Projects board that always seems full, so I’m not expecting any quick answers!

But I am very interested in what the ROR team thinks about these issues, and / or the plans that might already be in place, as well as the views of ROR users in general.

For what it’s worth, I have attached a short paper which provides my take on the questions above. My perspective is only based on my own previous use cases, and of course others may have very different experiences and ideas.

One last thought – would it be worth considering merging the the community and technical forums?

Neither has a huge amount of traffic, I think the subjects of most posts on both of them would be of interest to both ‘technical’ and ‘general’ users, and I am never sure where to post things. I think life would be simpler with a single forum.

Cheers

Steve

9. 
   

[Arthur Smith]

I will let others respond on the other questions, but language codes are extremely useful when matching to RDF data stores - for example Wikidata's query service. Generally rdfs:label or skos:altLabel strings have an attached language code. Matching a string directly in Persian or Japanese or even Spanish works very nicely and avoids the overhead of checking all possible languages in some way.

   Arthur

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