Current Issues in Software Internationalisation  

The trend toward globalisation of products and services has brought a strong economic imperative to the development of general methods for the localisation of software to different cultural environments. While ad hoc, bolt-on localisation may satisfy immediate commercial objectives, its extension to multiple locales is not cost-effective and an integrated strategy is needed. In this more sustainable approach, known as software internationalisation, the requirements of disparate markets are addressed during analysis and system design, with the architecture developed so that localisation to a particular environment is straightforward, and involves minimal re-engineering. Given the limited size of the Australasian market, detailed attention to the technical issues of internationalisation is of critical importance to the future of software development in the region, as is the availability of graduates adequately prepared for this environment. Thus motivated, this paper examines the state of play in a number of aspects of application level software internationalisation, with our focus the core research challenges of the next few years, and the consequences of these trends for the software engineering curriculum.

Hogan, James M., Chris Ho-Stuart and Binh Pham. Queensland University of Technology. Articles>Language>Localization>Software

An Introduction to Metadata

Metadata is structured data which describes the characteristics of a resource. It shares many similar characteristics to the cataloguing that takes place in libraries, museums and archives. The term 'meta' derives from the Greek word denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind. A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements representing specific attributes of a resource, and each element can have one or more values.

Taylor, Chris. University of Queensland (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata