News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

[Steven Bird]

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)