[WEB4LIB] Re: Java and e-resource vendors

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

Eric Hellman wrote:
> 
> I disagree completely with your assessment. It is 1000% easier to
> deploy non-roman script resources on the web than it was 5, even 3
> years ago.
>
> The reason is widespread support for Unicode and XML.
>
> A while ago we had a job porting an e-journal resource to korean. We
> used server-side java, xml, and xslt, and the client environment was
> a non-issue.

I'm really glad you responded.  It's nice to see porting work going
on for CJK languages.

Of course the fact that you can port an e-journal resource to Korean
is just part of the internationalization picture.  Actually it's just
an instance of (I'm sure very well executed) localization, and though
that's an important part of the picture, it's actually one that peo-
ple have been working on for several decades now.

What's your view on the stability of XML?  Here's mine: XML has seen a
lot of wrenching changes.  There were, at first, DTDs.  Then work was
done to create a new schema mechanism (one that hasn't stood the test
of time that DTDs did).  And there are namespaces, which were almost
laughable in the way they interacted, or failed to interact, with
DTDs (providing more impetus for the schema developments).  My sense
is that XML is great, but not for the reasons everyone says it is.
XML is basically just the excuse for everybody to get together and
agree on tractable, permanent, portable textual transfer/storage for-
mats.  But it's not affecting application portability all that much.
Vendors like Microsoft would still like you using their proprietary
APIs, middle-tier object repositories, and programming languages.
Java is not on the menu.

What journals, by the way, are being stored/housed as XML?  There
are probably a lot.  But the XML isn't visible as such, is it?  I
mean, we can get at it only via limited interfaces.  (Or is are the
interfaces broadening; and is this picture changing?  Are search
interfaces actually taking advantage of XML, qua descriptive mark-
up?)

This brings up another question: What about the all-important search
interfaces?

Suppose I want to look up articles under the subject heading of
Semitic philology (works on Arabic, Ge'ez, and other Semitic lang-
uages and literatures ) that contain the Hebrew word dvar.  Or what
if I'm looking through biblical/religious periodicals to find dis-
cussions of the Greek word logos and the Hebrew word dvar (the one
being a typical translation of the other in the Septuagint, for ex-
ample)?  What about articles wholly written in right-left languages
or in CJK languages.  I might well want to search them from a pro-
duct localized for the English-speaking world.

On a slightly different topic:

I'm aware that OCLC has come out with CJK cataloging tools, but of
course these only run under Windows (a major drawback in my estima-
tion, given the recent directions Microsoft has taken):

  http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/cjk.htm

I'm curious what other vendors are doing, in particular OPAC vend-
ors.

My sense is that although some localization is going on, there's
still not a lot out there to make the vast, multilingual resources
housed by most major libraries available to the public in a sys-
tematic, portable, permanent way.

Is there a body of literature on this topic?  If so, could some
kind soul perhaps put me on to it?

I apologize at any ignorance I've shown here.  There's a lot of
knowledge to be gained in this area, and I only possess a small
fraction of what I feel I really need....

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978