Sue Ellen Wright

ISOcat: remodelling metadata for language resources

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, is creating a state-of-the-art web environment for the ISO TC 37 (terminology and other language and content resources) metadata registry. This Data Category Registry (DCR) is called ISOcat and encompasses data categories for a broad range of language resources. Under the governance of the DCR Board, ISOcat provides an open work space for creating data category specifications, defining Data Category Selections (DCSs) (domain-specific groups of data categories), and standardising selected data categories and DCSs. Designers visualise future interactivity among the DCR, reference registries and ontological knowledge spaces.

Linking to linguistic data categories in ISOcat

ISO Technical Committee 37, Terminology and other language and content resources established an ISO 12620:2009 based Data Category Registry (DCR), called ISOcat (see http://www.isocat.org), to foster semantic interoperability of linguistic resources. This registry follows a grass roots approach, which means that any linguist can add the data categories (s)he needs. Standardized subsets of these data categories are created by a standardization procedure involving groups of international experts who are members of various Thematic Domain Groups (TDGs) and of the DCR Board. However, the goal of improving semantic interoperability can only be met if the data categories are reused by a wide variety of linguistic resource types. A resource indicates its usage of data categories by linking to them. ISO 12620:2009 specifies a small DC Reference XML vocabulary to annotate XML documents with links to data categories. The link is established by an URI, which servers as the Persistent IDentifier (PID) of a data category. Any XML document can now refer to data categories to explicate the semantics of elements, attributes and values. This paper discusses the efforts to mimic the same approach for RDF-based resources. It also introduces the RDF quad store based Relation Registry RELcat, which enables ontological relationships between data categories not supported by ISOcat and thus adds an extra level of linguistic knowledge.

Community efforts around the ISOcat Data Category Registry

The ISOcat Data Category Registry provides a community computing environment for creating, storing, retrieving, harmonizing and standardizing data category specifications (DCs), used to register linguistic terms used in various fields. This chapter recounts the history of DC documentation in TC 37, beginning from paper-based lists created for lexicographers and terminologists and progressing to the development of a web-based resource for a much broader range of users. While describing the considerable strides that have been made to collect a very large comprehensive collection of DCs, it also outlines difficulties that have arisen in developing a fully operative web-based computing environment for achieving consensus on data category names, definitions, and selections and describes efforts to overcome some of the present shortcomings and to establish positive working procedures designed to engage a wide range of people involved in the creation of language resources.