Cultures

A culture is the primary concept for organizing culture-specific parsing grammars. You can use cultures to create different parsing rules for different cultures and languages. Culture follows a hierarchy:

• Global Culture: The global culture is culture-independent and language agnostic. Use global culture to create parsing grammar rules that span all cultures and languages.
  • Language: A language is associated with a language, but not with a specific culture/region. For example, English.
    • Culture/Region: A culture/region is associated with a language and a country or region. For example, English in the United Kingdom, or English in the United States.

In the culture hierarchy, the parent of a culture/region is a language and the parent of a language is the global culture.

Culture/regions inherit the properties of the parent language. Languages inherit the properties of the global culture. As such, you can define parsing grammars in a language for use in multiple countries that share that language. Then, you can override the language grammar rules with specialized parsing grammars for a particular country or region that shares the same language as the base language culture, but has specific addressing, naming, or other country or regional differences.

You can also use culture inheritance to parse incoming records that have an assigned culture code, but no defined grammar rule for that culture code. In this case, Open Parser looks for a language code that has an assigned grammar rule. If it does not exist, Open Parser looks for an assigned grammar rule in the global culture.

The Domain Editor uses a combination of a language code and a culture code to represent language and culture/region, respectively.