[Platforms] Principle decision needed

[Lid Sjur Ringheim]

Dear Roy and Marilynn,

As we are one of the countries where the ships get named using those characters we would welcome the possibility very much.

The proposal Roy comes with about multilingual storage of ship names would actualy be the very best as it will make it possible to register the original name and a english friendly (possibly others?) name for users not familliar with the letters.

Cheers,
Sjur 
________________________________________
Fra: platforms-bounces at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk [platforms-bounces at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk] på vegne av Lowry, Roy K. [rkl at bodc.ac.uk]
Sendt: 23. mars 2012 22:44
Til: Marilynn Sørensen; platforms at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk
Kopi: dick at maris.nl
Emne: Re: [Platforms] Principle decision needed

Hi Marilynn,

Whilst we have been able to store full Latin-1 characters for a long time (since Oracle introduced Unicode support), I prefer to avoid them for two reasons:

1) The characters are extremely difficult to type from the keyboards I use - there may be keyboard shortcuts, but I don't know them so I usually end up opening Word, inserting symbol and then copying and pasting the character to wherever I need it.

2) There are issues that we've hit several times with character encoding mismatches causing web applications to render the Latin-1 characters incorrectly - they usually end up as square boxes. I don't know the technical details - all I know is that I have had to submit multiple bug reports and have experienced fixes for Java applications causing Perl applications to break and vice versa.

One way around the problem might be to introduce multilingual storage of ship names (obviously tagged with the appropriate languages) combined with the sort of Technology Google uses to allow Latin-1 and various equivalents to be discovered interoperably.  That way we could cover all bases.  We could even use that to go beyond Latin-1 into full multilingual support. What do people think about that?

Cheers, Roy.
________________________________
From: platforms-bounces at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk [platforms-bounces at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Marilynn Sørensen [marilynn at ices.dk]
Sent: 23 March 2012 18:45
To: platforms at mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk
Subject: [Platforms] Principle decision needed


Dear Platform Group,

You have seen the request for standardization of “ö” to “oe” so all vessels with “Hoegh” become “Hoeegh”.

There is an alternative which the platform group needs to discuss.

a)      Is it time to implement extended characters and allow “ö”, “ø”, “ä” etc? Both ICES and NOAA can handle this change.

b)      If yes, how should this be implemented?

•       Update all old ship names

•       Make a “point in time” change

Please send your views to me as soon as possible and by 23 April at the latest. We need answers from all members of the platform group. If other groups should be contacted for their views, please let us know.

Kind regards,

Marilynn

----------------------------------------------------------

Marilynn Sørensen

Data Manager

International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

H.C. Andersens Boulevard 44-46, 1553 Copenhagen V.

Denmark

marilynn.sorensen at ices.dk<mailto:marilynn.sorensen at ices.dk>

Direct tel: +45 33 38 67 20

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