I18n of Semantic Web Applications

Recently, the use of semantic technologies has gained quite some traction. With increased use of these technologies, their maturation not only in terms of performance, robustness but also with regard to support of non-latin-based languages and regional differences is of paramount importance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the current state of the internationalization (I18n) of Semantic Web technologies. Since resource identifiers play a crucial role for the Semantic Web, the internatinalization of resource identifiers is of high importance. It turns out that the prevalent resource identification mechanism on the Semantic Web, i.e. URIs, are not sufficient for an efficient internationalization of knowledge bases. Fortunately, with IRIs a standard for international resource identifiers is available, but its support needs much more penetration and homogenization in various semantic web technology stacks. In addition, we review various RDF serializations with regard to their support for internationalized knowledge bases. The paper also contains an in-depth review of popular semantic web tools and APIs with regard to their support for internationalization.