Description Logics UTF-8 parser - utf-8

Trying to deepen my comprehension of OWL and Description Logics, I'm disappointed I cannot find a Description Logics parser which could convert DL to a web ontology syntax ("DL German syntax" if I'm not wrong).
For getting acquainted with the notation, on Windows, I use AutoHotkey with sends UTF-8 symbols to the editor (ex: Send {U+2200} writes ∀). This works well with Sublime Text, VSCode or Notepad3 to name a few, with a supporting font of course, but can I go further and use a reasoner from DL Syntax directly or through a converter back and forth to at least one usable syntax like the Manchester notation ?

Related

Character set conversion problem - debug invalid characters - reverse engineer earlier conversions

Character conversion problem.
I have a few strings which are incorrectly encoded or decoded.
The strings came in an ASCII format CSV file.
The current strings I have are:
N‚met
Tet‹
I know, that the:
"‚" character (0x82) should be originally "é" (é acute accent)
"‹" character (0x8B) should be originally "ő" (o double acute accent)
How can I debug and reverse engineer, what conversions happened with the original characters to get the current characters?
I suppose that multiple decoding encoding happened, but I was not able to reproduce the original character.
I put an expanded version of my comment as answer:
Your viewer uses CP1252 (English and Western Europe, also called ANSI in Windows) or CP1250 (Eastern Europe) or an other similar code page. Most of characters are coded in the same manner, just few language specific changes. Your example do not includes character that are different on the two encoding, so I cannot say precisely.
That code pages are used on Microsoft Windows, and they are based (but not 100% compatible) with Latin-1, so it is common to see text interpreted with such encoding. MacOs and Linux are heavily (now) UTF-8 encoded. Windows uses Unicode internally (but UTF-16)
The old encoding is probably CP437: the standard code page in DOS, so it was used frequently also for CSV files. Other frequent old encoding are CP850 (Western Europe) and CP852 (Central Europe).
For the other answers you put in the comments, I think you should go to Superuser (if you are requesting tools (some editors allow you to specify the encoding. You may use the browser (opening a local file): browsers also allow you to choose the local encoding, and I think you may copy as Unicode [not sure], other tools sometime has hidden option to import files, but possibly not with all options), or as new question in this site, if you want to do it programmatically. But so you are required to specify the language. Python is well suited for such conversions (most scripting languages are created to handle texts): python has built in many encoding, you should just specify when reading and when writing the files. R also can be instructed on the input encoding.
I wrote my own utility that helped me to diagnose and fix many thorny encoding issues. It is available as part of an Open source library. The utility converts any String to unicode sequence and vise-versa. All you will have to do is:
String codes = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.encodeStringToUnicodeSequence("Hello world");
And it will return String "\u0048\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0057\u006f\u0072\u006c\u0064"
The same would work for any String in any language including special characters. Here is the link to the article Open Source Java library with stack trace filtering, Silent String parsing Unicode converter and Version comparison that explains about the library and where to get it (available both on Maven central and github. In the article search for paragraph: "String Unicode converter". So when you read your String convert it and see what comes up. This way you will see what symbols are there and if the info is correct and only distorted by some wrong encoding or the info itself is lost. You can easily find info on internet that provides tables of mapping of any symbol to a unicode

Is there a standard computer vocabulary for German? for Spanish?

I was given the task of coming up with shorter German words for the German version of our software.
It got me to thinking that there should be some sort of standard vocabulary for information technology somewhere. Like there "have to be" terms that most (if not all) German computer users use for what English-speakers call file, database, record, search, search terms, search hits, find and replace, delete, OCR ... you get the idea.
I found ISO 2382 on the ISO Web site, but it only seems to standardize English and French. Is there an equivalent standard for German? How about for Spanish, or for other languages?
I may suggest this book, although quite dated, was an attempt to come up with a set of standard computer terms for translating from German to English and back:
Grosses IWT-Wörterbuch der Computertechnik und der Wirtschaftsinformatik. Englisch-Deutsch. Deutsch-Englisch
I will offer up the answer, "no".
Even within English, there are not standard words to describe computer operations as you have presented them. Certainly one can "delete" a file, but they can also "erase" it, "remove" it, an (shudder) "move it to the trash can".
Instead of trying to solve the problem in the large, I suggest you solve the problem in the small. Build a glossary of commonly used German words, and whenever there is an opportunity to expand the Glossary, first look over the existing entries and do your best to reuse the current terminology.
In a way, the reason good English documentation works well is because good writers of English use a glossary like technique explicitly or implicitly. In the event that much of your documentation comes from a single source, or related set of sources, you can make a "translation map" of "when they say X, we say Y". But, even such simplifications often require native readers to re-read the translation in context, as languages are not nearly regular enough to do simple substitution without many pitfalls.
As a starting point, The Open Group (www.opengroup.org) seems to have defined glossaries as part of their work on The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), which appear to be the sort of thing I needed. For example, these document numbers and titles are taken directly from their Web site:
C148 TOGAF® 9.1 Translation Glossary: English – Hrvatski (Croatian)
C149 TOGAF® 9.1 Translation Glossary: English – Castilian Spanish
C146 TOGAF® 9.1 Translation Glossary: English – Portuguese (Portugal)
C13H TOGAF® 9.1 Translation Glossary: English – Slovak

Enhancing an ASCII protcol with multilingual fields

I am enhancing a piece of software that implements a simple ASCII based protocol.
The protocol is simple... here is an example of what the messages look a little bit like (not the same though, I can't show you the real protocol):
AUTH 1 1 200<CR><LF>
To which we get a response looking similar to
230 DEVICE 1 STATE AUTH 200 OUTPUT 1 NAME "Photo Black"<CR><LF>
The name "Photo Black" comes from a database sqlite database. I need to enhance it to support foreign languages. So I've been thinking that the field "Photo Black" needs to be "optionally" encoded as a UTF-8 string between the quotes. I'm wondering if there is a standard for this so that the client application can interpret the string in the quotes and straight away recognize it as either UTF-8 or plain ASCII. I'm not willing to rewrite the protocol, that would be too much work. Just slip in some kind of encoding for clients to recognize some Spanish or Swedish names.
I don't want the field to be always interpreted as UTF-8 either, long story there. You know how in C++ I can type 0xFF and the compiler knows that this is a hex string... is there an equivalent for UTF-8? Sorry I may be jumping the gun but I'm not that familiar with UTF-8 encoding and internationalization in general.
Do you have control over both the server and the client? If not, you can't change the protocol so you won't be able to do it. When you say you're "not wiling to rewrite the protocol" - you're going to have to do so at least to some extent. Whatever you do, you will be changing the protocol.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to always interpret the data as UTF-8 either - if it's currently only ASCII, then it would be completely backward compatible to always interpret it as UTF-8, as all ASCII is encoded the same way in UTF-8. Perhaps if you could give more information, we could provide more help.
You could introduce a prefix for UTF-8-encoded strings, e.g. U:
230 DEVICE 1 STATE AUTH 200 OUTPUT 1 NAME U"Photo UTF-8 stuff here Black"<CR><LF>
would that help?
Do you actually have an 8-bit data path? If something is going to mangle the top bit of every byte, then you'll need to consider options like Punycode instead of UTF-8.
Read up on the concept of Ascii Compatible Encoding, or ACE. iDNS is an example. So is/was UTF-7.
Here's the master speaking.
You really can't code-switch in and out of UTF-8. For a nightmare, look up ISO-2022, which attempted to support that sort of thing. Also keep in mind that UTF-8 includes ASCII, but not Latin-1.
Why don't you want the field to be "always interpreted as UTF-8"? You don't say.
If you do have the client interpret the protocol as UTF-8 encoded text, all of the existing output will still work correctly, since UTF-8 is a proper superset of ASCII.

Validating Kana Input

I am working on an application that allows users to input Japanese language characters. I am trying to come up with a way to determine whether the user's input is a Japanese kana (hiragana, katakana, or kanji).
There are certain fields in the application where entering Latin text would be inappropriate and I need a way to limit certain fields to kanji-only, or katakana-only, etc.
The project uses UTF-8 encoding. I don't expect to accept JIS or Shift-JIS input.
Ideas?
It sounds like you basically need to just check whether each Unicode character is within a particular range. The Unicode code charts should be a good starting point.
If you're using .NET, my MiscUtil library has some Unicode range support - it's primitive, but it should do the job. I don't have the source to hand right now, but will update this post with an example later if it would be helpful.
Not sure of a perfect answer, but there is a Unicode range for katakana and hiragana listed on Wikipedia. (Which I would expect are also available from unicode.org as well.)
Hiragana: Unicode: 3040-309F
Katakana: Unicode: 30A0–30FF
Checking those ranges against the input should work as a validation for hiragana or katakana for Unicode in a language-agnostic manner.
For kanji, I would expect it to be a little more complicated, as I
expect that the Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese are both included in the same range, but then again, I may be wrong here. (I can't expect that Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to be included in the same range...)
oh oh! I had this one once... I had a regex with the hiragana, then katakana and then the kanji. I forget the exact codes, I'll go have a look.
regex is great because you double the problems. And I did it in PHP, my choice for extra strong auto problem generation
--edit--
$pattern = '/[^\wぁ-ゔァ-ヺー\x{4E00}-\x{9FAF}_\-]+/u';
I found this here, but it's not great... I'll keep looking
--edit--
I looked through my portable hard drive.... I thought I had kept that particular snippet from the last company... sorry.

Is it possible to create INTERNATIONAL permalinks?

i was wondering how you deal with permalinks on international sites. By permalink i mean some link which is unique and human readable.
E.g. for english phrases its no problem e.g. /product/some-title/
but what do you do if the product title is in e.g chinese language??
how do you deal with this problem?
i am implementing an international site and one requirement is to have human readable URLs.
Thanks for every comment
Characters outside the ISO Latin-1 set are not permitted in URLs according to this spec, so Chinese strings would be out immediately.
Where the product name can be localised, you can use urls like <DOMAIN>/<LANGUAGE>/DIR/<PRODUCT_TRANSLATED>, e.g.:
http://www.example.com/en/products/cat/
http://www.example.com/fr/products/chat/
accompanied by a mod_rewrite rule to the effect of:
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/product/([a-z]+)? product_lookup.php?lang=$1&product=$2
For the first example above, this rule will call product_lookup.php?lang=en&product=cat. Inside this script is where you would access the internal translation engine (from the lang parameter, en in this case) to do the same translation you do on the user-facing side to translate, say, "Chat" on the French page, "Cat" on the English, etc.
Using an external translation API would be a good idea, but tricky to get a reliable one which works correctly in your business domain. Google have opened up a translation API, but it currently only supports a limited number of languages.
English <=> Arabic
English <=> Chinese
English <=> Russian
Take a look at Wikipedia.
They use national characters in URLs.
For example, Russian home page URL is: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Заглавная_страница. The browser transparently encodes all non-ASCII characters and replaces them by their codes when sending URL to the server.
But on the web page all URLs are human-readable.
So you don't need to do anything special -- just put your product names into URLs as is.
The webserver should be able to decode them for your application automatically.
I usually transliterate the non-ascii characters. For example "täst" would become "taest". GNU iconv can do this for you (I'm sure there are other libraries):
$ echo täst | iconv -t 'ascii//translit'
taest
Alas, these transliterations are locale dependent: in languages other than german, 'ä' could be translitertated as simply 'a', for example. But on the other side, there should be a transliteration for every (commonly used) character set into ASCII.
How about some scheme like /productid/{product-id-number}/some-title/
where the site looks at the {number} and ignores the 'some-title' part entirely. You can put that into whatever language or encoding you like, because it's not being used.
If memory serves, you're only able to use English letters in URLs. There's a discussion to change that, but I'm fairly positive that it's not been implemented yet.
that said, you'd need to have a look up table where you assign translations of products/titles into whatever word that they'll be in the other language. For example:
foo.com/cat will need a translation look up for "cat" "gato" "neko" etc.
Then your HTTP module which is parsing those human reading objects into an exact url will know which page to serve based upon the translations.
Creating a look up for such thing seems an overflow to me. I cannot create a lookup for all the different words in all languages. Maybe accessing an translation API would be a good idea.
So as far as I can see its not possible to use foreign chars in the permalink as the sepecs of the URL does not allow it.
What do you think of encoding the specials chars? are those URLs recognized by Google then?

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