Desire

Internationalization in the DESIRE Project

http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/DESIRE/DesireI18N.html

This is a working paper that describes some of the technical issues involved in creating international subject gateways on the World Wide Web (WWW). An international gateway is one that can handle resources written in different languages and that offers a multilingual interface to those resources. The paper is written by Jon Knight, the co-author of the ROADS software.

A number of internationalization issues faced by cataloguing and indexing software are discussed, including:

low level character set and encoding issues
higher level issue of multiple languages in use simultaneously.

The paper focuses on the internationalization issues for ROADS gateways and has sections on:

HTML output
stored catalogue records
robot generated index data
end user searching
end user browsing

It is likely to be of interest to any gateway or Internet service thinking of developing a multilingual interface or thinking of cataloguing or indexing multilingual resources.

See also
Developing Multilingual Subject Gateways