Continuing the series of posts (which started with BP1 and BP2) about the W3C group document, the WG DWBP, I will comment by translating the third best practice.
BP3: Provide metadata with locale parameters
Provide metadata with locale parameters, that is, describing date, time, and number formats, as well as the language in which the data is published.
Providing locale parameters helps humans and computer applications work accurately when interpreting data that identifies dates, currencies, and numbers that may look similar but have different meanings in different locales. For example, the date '4/7' can be read as April 7th or July 4th, depending on where the data was created. Similarly, € 2.000 is either two thousand euros or a representation of two Euros with trailing zeros. By making the locale and language explicit, you give users the chance to discover what the data is and what it refers to, interpreting it according to local standards. This also has the same effect on machine translation services.
To the side, an example image of an application that uses locale parameter metadata to identify functions for the user. Taken from: https://flic.kr/p/68xJNx
Expected result
Humans and software agents will be able to interpret datasets containing dates, times, currencies, numbers, etc., with precision.
Possible Implementation
Some examples of locale parameters are:
The language(s) of the dataset;
The formats used for numerical values, dates, and time. The machine-readable version of the metadata can be provided in accordance with the W3C recommended vocabulary for describing datasets, i.e., the data catalog vocabulary, or VOCAB-DCAT.
See the example below that includes locale metadata:
The dataset below shows bus stop data (stops-2015-05-05) with the inclusion of locale parameter metadata. The dct:language property is used to declare the languages in which a dataset is published. If the dataset is available in multiple languages, use multiple values for this property. The dct:conformsTo property is used to specify the standard adopted for date and time formats.
:stops-2015-05-05
a dcat:Dataset ;
dct:title "Bus stops of MyCity" ;
dcat:keyword "transport","mobility","bus" ;
dct:issued "2015-05-05"^^xsd:date ;
dcat:contactPoint <http://data.mycity.example.com/transport/contact> ;
dct:temporal <http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/year/2015> ;
dct:spatial <http://www.geonames.org/3399415> ;
dct:publisher :transport-agency-mycity ;
dct:accrualPeriodicity <http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/code#freq-A> ;
dcat:theme :mobility ;
dcat:distribution :stops-2015-05-05.csv ;
dct:language <http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/en> ;
dct:language <http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/pt> ;
dct:conformsTo <http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm> ;
.
Here you can check an example with this type of metadata in a human-readable format.
Before publishing your data, make sure that the metadata includes information about locale parameters in a human-readable format. Additionally, also check if the dataset has locale information in a machine-readable format. This is important to allow the integration of products that use this data across multiple platforms (applications, websites, social networks), facilitating data delivery to the consumer user.