The Open Language Archive Community and digital infrastructure for archive interoperability

Steven Bird

As language data and associated technologies proliferate and as the language resources community expands, it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate and reuse existing resources. Are there any lexical resources for such-and-such a language? What tool works 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 presentation reports on a new digital infrastructure for discovering language resources being developed by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). At the core of OLAC is its metadata format, which is designed to facilitate description and discovery of all kinds of language resources, including data, tools, or advice. The paper describes OLAC metadata, its relationship to Dublin Core metadata, and its dissemination using the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative.

[This talk presents joint work with Gary Simons and the OLAC Community, sponsored by the NSF/EU Project "International Standards in Language Engineering"]