From sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Dec 31 20:43:25 2001 From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 15:43:25 EST Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Message-ID: Dear Community, OLAC is now one year old, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and to update you on recent developments. OLAC LAUNCH THIS FRIDAY OLAC will be officially launched at an OLAC symposium to take place at the 76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in the San Francisco Hyatt Regency, on Friday 4 January 2002. The symposium will include presentations from Gary Simons, Helen Aristar-Dry, Megan Crowhurst, Chu-Ren Huang, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven Bird. The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC standards for a one year period, to make it easy for prospective participants to implement the standards without having to worry about aiming at a moving target. (However we will continue to develop the vocabularies). OLAC OPEN HOUSE Also at the LSA there will be an informal discussion and demonstration session for prospective OLAC archives (Saturday 2-3:30pm). Be sure to stop by if you would like to learn more about OLAC infrastructure and how you can participate by contributing your own metadata. OLAC SEARCH ENGINE AT LINGUIST LINGUIST list has recently announced their OLAC service provider. It uses the OLAC harvester developed by Eva Banik at the LDC, along with their own user interface (see the OLAC page for pointers). This step represents a significant milestone in the adoption of OLAC by the linguistics community, and will be an inducement to more archives to contribute their metadata. Our thanks to the wonderful folks at LINGUIST! SIL ETHNOLOGUE JOINS OLAC The Ethnologue database of the world's languages now has an OLAC interface, and can be accessed via any OLAC service provider. With this addition of 7,000+ records, OLAC now boasts over 18,000 records. These records come from 13 archives in five countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands). OLAC SUPPORT FOR THE WIDER LANGUAGE RESOURCES COMMUNITY The Open Language Archives Community seeks to embrace all members of the language resources community, from well-established institutional archives to individuals who want to share research results. Would-be participants thus operate in a wide variety of circumstances. In order to ensure that the barrier to participation should be as low as possible, OLAC provides three approaches to becoming an OLAC data provider. 1. Conventional OAI Data Provider: The data provider implements a software interface to an existing catalog database that permits metadata to be harvested via an HTTP-based protocol. 2. Vida, the Virtual Data Provider, is an OLAC service that provides the harvesting protocol for metadata repositories that are expressed as XML documents. 3. ORE, the OLAC Repository Editor, is a form-based editor on the OLAC Web site that allows a user to construct a small metadata repository that will be serviced by Vida. Prototypes of Vida and ORE are available on the OLAC website, in a link from the main page "Becoming an OLAC Data Provider". These systems will be demonstrated at the LSA. REGISTRATION FOR OLAC PARTICIPATING ARCHIVES AND SERVICES New registration pages have been set up for would-be archives and services, to streamline the expansion process. Please see the COMMUNITY section of the OLAC website for pointers. PROGRESS ON OLAC STANDARDS OLAC standards describe the working of OLAC infrastructure, the procedures that participating archives and services must follow in order to co-operate effectively. These documents are undergoing community review and will shortly be promoted to "candidate status" while they undergo widespread testing as a prelude to full adoption as a standard. OLAC Process: - summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC (i.e. the purpose, vision, and core values) and then describes how OLAC is organized and how it operates [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html] OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: - defines the protocol OLAC service providers use to harvest metadata from OLAC data providers. It defines the responses that OLAC data providers must make to the requests of the protocol [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/protocol.html] OLAC Metadata set: - specifies the metadata set used by OLAC for the interchange of metadata within the framework of the Open Archives Initiative [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms.html] OLAC METADATA SET DOCUMENT TRANSLATED INTO CHINESE Chu-Ren Huang, a member of the OLAC advisory board from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, has translated the metadata set document into Chinese, as part of his efforts to encourage stronger participation in Asia. Pointers can be found on the DOCS page [http://www.language-archives.org/docs.html] For full details and more news, please consult the OLAC website at http://www.language-archives.org/ Best wishes, Steven (& Gary) ________ Steven Bird, University of Pennsylvania (sb at ldc.upenn.edu) Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org) OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org) From sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Dec 31 20:43:25 2001 From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 15:43:25 EST Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Message-ID: Dear Community, OLAC is now one year old, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and to update you on recent developments. OLAC LAUNCH THIS FRIDAY OLAC will be officially launched at an OLAC symposium to take place at the 76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in the San Francisco Hyatt Regency, on Friday 4 January 2002. The symposium will include presentations from Gary Simons, Helen Aristar-Dry, Megan Crowhurst, Chu-Ren Huang, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven Bird. The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC standards for a one year period, to make it easy for prospective participants to implement the standards without having to worry about aiming at a moving target. (However we will continue to develop the vocabularies). OLAC OPEN HOUSE Also at the LSA there will be an informal discussion and demonstration session for prospective OLAC archives (Saturday 2-3:30pm). Be sure to stop by if you would like to learn more about OLAC infrastructure and how you can participate by contributing your own metadata. OLAC SEARCH ENGINE AT LINGUIST LINGUIST list has recently announced their OLAC service provider. It uses the OLAC harvester developed by Eva Banik at the LDC, along with their own user interface (see the OLAC page for pointers). This step represents a significant milestone in the adoption of OLAC by the linguistics community, and will be an inducement to more archives to contribute their metadata. Our thanks to the wonderful folks at LINGUIST! SIL ETHNOLOGUE JOINS OLAC The Ethnologue database of the world's languages now has an OLAC interface, and can be accessed via any OLAC service provider. With this addition of 7,000+ records, OLAC now boasts over 18,000 records. These records come from 13 archives in five countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands). OLAC SUPPORT FOR THE WIDER LANGUAGE RESOURCES COMMUNITY The Open Language Archives Community seeks to embrace all members of the language resources community, from well-established institutional archives to individuals who want to share research results. Would-be participants thus operate in a wide variety of circumstances. In order to ensure that the barrier to participation should be as low as possible, OLAC provides three approaches to becoming an OLAC data provider. 1. Conventional OAI Data Provider: The data provider implements a software interface to an existing catalog database that permits metadata to be harvested via an HTTP-based protocol. 2. Vida, the Virtual Data Provider, is an OLAC service that provides the harvesting protocol for metadata repositories that are expressed as XML documents. 3. ORE, the OLAC Repository Editor, is a form-based editor on the OLAC Web site that allows a user to construct a small metadata repository that will be serviced by Vida. Prototypes of Vida and ORE are available on the OLAC website, in a link from the main page "Becoming an OLAC Data Provider". These systems will be demonstrated at the LSA. REGISTRATION FOR OLAC PARTICIPATING ARCHIVES AND SERVICES New registration pages have been set up for would-be archives and services, to streamline the expansion process. Please see the COMMUNITY section of the OLAC website for pointers. PROGRESS ON OLAC STANDARDS OLAC standards describe the working of OLAC infrastructure, the procedures that participating archives and services must follow in order to co-operate effectively. These documents are undergoing community review and will shortly be promoted to "candidate status" while they undergo widespread testing as a prelude to full adoption as a standard. OLAC Process: - summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC (i.e. the purpose, vision, and core values) and then describes how OLAC is organized and how it operates [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html] OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: - defines the protocol OLAC service providers use to harvest metadata from OLAC data providers. It defines the responses that OLAC data providers must make to the requests of the protocol [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/protocol.html] OLAC Metadata set: - specifies the metadata set used by OLAC for the interchange of metadata within the framework of the Open Archives Initiative [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms.html] OLAC METADATA SET DOCUMENT TRANSLATED INTO CHINESE Chu-Ren Huang, a member of the OLAC advisory board from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, has translated the metadata set document into Chinese, as part of his efforts to encourage stronger participation in Asia. Pointers can be found on the DOCS page [http://www.language-archives.org/docs.html] For full details and more news, please consult the OLAC website at http://www.language-archives.org/ Best wishes, Steven (& Gary) ________ Steven Bird, University of Pennsylvania (sb at ldc.upenn.edu) Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org) OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)