Resource Package

Authored resources contain natural language elements, and are therefore created in some original language, recorded in the orginal_language attribute of the AUTHORED_RESOURCE class. Information about translations is included in the translations attribute, which allows for one or more sets of translation details to be recorded. A resource is translated by doing the following:

The languages_available function provides a complete list of languages in the resource.

What is normally considered the 'meta-data' of a resource, i.e. its author, date of creation, purpose, and other descriptive items, is described by the RESOURCE_DESCRIPTION and RESOURCE_DESCRIPTION_ITEM classes. The parts of this that are in natural language, and therefore may require translated versions, are represented in instances of the RESOURCE_DESCRIPTION_ITEM class. Thus, if a RESOURCE_DESCRIPTION has more than one RESOURCE_DESCRIPTION_ITEM, each of these should carry exactly the same information in a different natural language.

The AUTHORED_RESOURCE.description attribute is optional, allowing for resources with no meta-data at all, e.g. resources in a partial state of construction. The translations attribute may still be required, since there may be other parts of the resource object (specified by a class into which AUTHORED_RESOURCE is inherited) that are language-dependent.

When the resource is considered to be in a state where changes to it should be controlled, the is_controlled attribute is set to True, and all subsequent changes should have an audit trail recorded. Usually controlled resources would be managed in a versioned repository (e.g. implemented by CVS, Subversion or similar systems), and audit information will be stored somewhere in the repository (e.g. in version control files). The revision_history attribute defined in the AUTHORED_RESOURCE class is intended to act as a documentary copy of the revision history as known inside the repository, for the benefit of users of the resource. Given that resources in different places may well be managed in different kinds of repositories, having a copy of the revision history in a standardised form within the resource enables it to be used interoperably by authoring and other tools.

Every change to a resource committed to the relevant repository causes a new addition to the revision_history.