[Sigia-l] notation for locales

[James Aylett]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 03:22:27PM -0400, Ruth Kaufman wrote:

> Think of realtors in the US. Their service offering may only be
> relevant to people living in a small region, such as Research
> Triangle Park in North Carolina, but that doesn't mean that the
> content of the site isn't technically consumable by anyone who can
> read English, regardless of where they currently live or their
> propensity to buy real estate in North Carolina. The content is
> simply available in US English, and users are left to figure out if
> the company's or site's offerings are relevant and useful to them.

That's true - but if you bundle all the realtor services together into
one big website you start wanting to filter based on location context
(whether it's where you are now, or where you want to move
to). Whether this is actually a locale issue depends, I suspect, on
your IA - on how you're thinking about your data. It might simply be a
filter that has nothing to do with locale. (As it is with most house
buying websites in the UK, at least.)

> The way you're exploring this topic is to bridge conceptually between
> geographically-defined markets and more granular geographic regions...
> and, by extension, the relevance of information to individuals living
> in, passing through, or simply interested in these regions.

I guess so, yes. I'm thinking in terms of some people I know working
on sites with local information across quite a wide range of locations
(either currently or in their roadmap). I've also been doing a lot of
theoretical thinking recently, so perhaps I'm coming at the problem of
how someone interacts with your site's information somewhat
differently to how most localisation efforts will tackle
things. (Again, whether this is actually a valuable way of looking at
it is an open question ;-)

> It brings to mind geo tagging. It's interesting to think of that as
> a form of localization. I wouldn't use locale notation for
> geo-tagging. Through observation, it seems people doing geo-tagging
> with postal addresses, lat/long coordinates, zip codes, states,
> countries, and/or cross streets. If asked to develop a data model, I
> would leave language out of geo-tagging and treat it as a separate
> facet of the information.

Yes, I wouldn't try to combine them. I think what I'm trying to say is
that there are several facets of personal preference associated with
information consumption (including language, topic bias, location bias
and so forth), and that from some points of view localisation is
really a specific way of tackling that problem.

(Which gives a hint as to how you might notate in that situation,
although quite how you do that on a 2D non-interactive document is
beyond me.)

> As places and regions are intrinsically spatial, it also brings to
> mind event-based targeting, whether through tagging or otherwise --
> the temporal complement to geo-tagging?

Something like Upcoming provides both geo- and time- data about
events, and has (some) mechanics for browsing around the space and
time you're looking at. These dimensions are, of course, special in
that they are intrinsic (where language isn't necessarily: a film or
presentation might be in a particular language, but the language you
display site features in is not intrinsic to an event).

James

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org