Gary F. Simons

The Open Language Archives Community: An infrastructure for distributed archiving of language resources

New ways of documenting and describing language via electronic media coupled with new ways of distributing the results via the World -Wide Web offer a degree of access to language resources that is unparalleled in history. At the same time, the proliferation of approaches to using these new technologies is causing serious problems relating to resource discovery and resource creation. This article describes the infras tructure that the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) has built in order to address these problems. Its technical and usage infrastructures address problems of resource discovery by constructing a single virtual library of distributed resources. Its go vernance infrastructure addresses problems of resource creation by providing a mechanism through which the language-resource community can express its consensus on recommended best practices.

Extending Dublin Core Metadata to Support the Description and Discovery of Language Resources

As language data and associatedtechnologies proliferate and as the languageresources community expands, it is becomingincreasingly difficult to locate and reuse existingresources. Are there any lexical resources forsuch-and-such a language? What tool workswith transcripts in this particular format?What is a good format to use for linguisticdata of this type? Questions like these dominate manymailing lists, since web search engines are anunreliable way to find language resources. Thispaper reports on a new digital infrastructurefor discovering language resources beingdeveloped by the Open Language Archives Community(OLAC). At the core of OLAC is its metadataformat, which is designed to facilitatedescription and discovery of all kinds oflanguage resources, including data, tools, oradvice. The paper describes OLAC metadata, itsrelationship to Dublin Core metadata, and itsdissemination using the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative.

Building an Open Language Archives Community on the OAI Foundation.

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources. The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the OAI Protocol have provided a solid foundation for the OLAC framework. However, we need more precision in community‐specific aspects of resource description than is offered by DC. Furthermore, many of the institutions and individuals who might participate in OLAC do not have the technical resources to support the OAI protocol. This paper presents our solutions to these two problems.

The OLAC metadata set and controlled vocabularies

As language data and associated technologies proliferate and as the language resources community rapidly expands, it has become difficult to locate and reuse existing resources. Are there any lexical resources for such-and-such a language? What tool can work with transcripts in this particular format? What is a good format to use for linguistic data of this type? Questions like these dominate many mailing lists, since web search engines are an unreliable way to find language resources. This paper describes a new digital infrastructure for language resource discovery, based on the Open Archives Initiative, and called OLAC -- the Open Language Archives Community. The OLAC Metadata Set and the associated controlled vocabularies facilitate consistent description and focussed searching. We report progress on the metadata set and controlled vocabularies, describing current issues and soliciting input from the language resources community.

A rationale for the TEI recommendations for feature-structure markup

In this paper, we concentrate on justifying the decisions we made in developing the TEI recommendations for feature structure markup. The first four sections of this paper present the justification for the recommended treatment of feature structures, of features and their values, and of combinations of features or values and of alternations and negations of features and their values. Section 5 departs briefly from the linguistic focus to argue that the markup scheme developed for feature structures is in fact a general-purpose mechanism that can be used for a wide range of applications. Section 6 describes an auxiliary document called a “feature system declaration” that is used to document and validate a system of feature-structure markup. The seventh and final section illustrates the use of the recommended markup scheme with two examples, lexical tagging and interlinear text analysis.

Rating the vitality of sign languages

The Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), developed by Lewis and Simons and based on work by Fishman, provides a means of rating ‘language vitality’ – the level of development or endangerment – where ‘development’ is understood as adding or preserving functions and ‘endangerment’ as loss of function. In its original form, it did not take sign languages into account. This paper explains what adjustments are needed to accommodate signed and spoken languages on an equal basis, recognising and generalising over the sociolinguistic differences in the two types of language communities. Besides minor wording changes made to avoid giving the impression that EGIDS applied only to spoken languages, we offer substantive changes to accommodate different patterns of intergenerational transmission; to better reflect the role of literacy, education, literature, institutional support, and standardisation in language development; and to reflect factors other than classic language shift which can undermine a language’s vitality. Clarifications are made to the role of interpreters in rating a language’s vitality, and in the definition of a language of wider communication. Several of these changes provide further insights into factors that affect the vitality of spoken languages.

Using Architectural Forms to Map TEI Data into an Object-Oriented Database

This paper develops a solution to the problem of importing existing TEI data into an existing object-oriented database schema without changing the TEI data or the database schema. The solution is based on architectural processing. Two meta-DTDs are used, one to define the architectural forms for the object model and another to map the existing SGML data onto those forms. A full example using a critical text in TEI markup is developed.

Enterprise Architecture as Language

Seven years ago the senior leadership at SIL International (see Chart 1), a not-for-profit whose purpose is to facilitate language-based development among the peoples of the world, determined that it was time to build an integrated Enterprise Information System. There were three precipitating factors: mission critical IT systems were almost twenty years old and on the verge of obsolescence, their landscape was dotted with dozens of silo systems, and commitments to new strategic directions demanded significant business re-engineering.