From sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu  Thu Oct  4 14:25:11 2001
From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird)
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 10:25:11 EDT
Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
Message-ID: <THU.4.OCT.2001.102511.EDT.SB@LDC.UPENN.EDU>

Dear community,

There have been a number of notable developments with OLAC in recent weeks.

OLAC WEBSITE

  The website has been completely restructured, providing much easier access
  to OLAC information and documents.  Please see it for yourself by visiting
  http://www.language-archives.org/.  We welcome your feedback.

OLAC LAUNCH

  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, 3-6 January 2002.  The symposium will include
  presentations from Helen Aristar-Dry, Gary Simons, Megan Crowhurst,
  Chu-Ren Huang, Brian MacWhinney, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven
  Bird.  The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC metadata set for a
  one year period of experimentation.

OLAC SEARCH ENGINE

  The OLAC prototype search engine now harvests 9,000+ records from ten
  archives: LDC, ELRA, DFKI, TDProject, Perseus, ANLC, APS, LACITO, CBOLD
  and AISRI.  Test it out using the search field at the top of the OLAC
  pages.  (In time this engine will be hosted at linguistlist.org).

NSF E-MELD PROJECT

  Anthony Aristar at Wayne State University and colleagues at Eastern
  Michigan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University
  of Arizona, have been awarded a $2 million NSF grant to develop a public
  digital archive of endangered language data.  The archive will employ
  OLAC metadata.

OLAC PRESENTED IN EUROPE AND ASIA

  OLAC was presented in a workshop at the 39th Annual Meeting of the
  Association for Computational Linguistics (Toulouse, July).  Next month,
  OLAC will be presented by Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in a
  workshop at the 6th Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
  (Tokyo, November 2001).


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 gary_simons at sil.org  Mon Oct 22 21:40:06 2001
From: gary_simons at sil.org (Gary Simons)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 17:40:06 -0400
Subject: New draft of OLAC Metadata Set document
Message-ID: <MON.22.OCT.2001.174006.0400.OLACGENERAL@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dear community,

We have just posted a new draft of the document describing the
proposed metadata set for the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC).
This is the foundational document that lays out the standards that
participating archives would follow when generating XML descriptions
of their language resources.  The URL is:

   http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms-20011022.html

This replaces the previous version which was issued on June 16. This
release of the metadata document coincides with the release of version
0.4 of the XML schema for OLAC metadata. All known inconsistencies
between the prior versions of both have been rectified.  Steven is
posting the details of what has changed in the schema to the
OLAC-Implementers list.

This is a summary of the changes as listed in the document header:

   1. Adds scheme attribute (see sections 1 and 2).
   2. The lang attribute on <olac> is renamed to langs.
   3. Adds alternative as a possible refinement for Title so
 that the
      original title can be distinguished from translations.
   4. Type.data is renamed as Type.linguistic.
   5. Significant addition to discussion of Coverage.
   6. Numerous minor editorial revisions.




If the definitions in the document are not adequate to help you
determine how to use a particular element, if you don't agree with a
definition, if you think of a case that should be addressed in an
example, or another kind of reaction that will help to improve the
document,  then please give us feedback! Also, take special note of
the "To do" comments in red; if you could give some help in any of
those matters we'd be happy for volunteers!

We hope to hear from some of you. Your participation and feedback is
essential for building a metadata standard that will truly meet the
needs of our community.

Best wishes,

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  Thu Oct  4 14:25:11 2001
From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird)
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 10:25:11 EDT
Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
Message-ID: <THU.4.OCT.2001.102511.EDT.SB@LDC.UPENN.EDU>

Dear community,

There have been a number of notable developments with OLAC in recent weeks.

OLAC WEBSITE

  The website has been completely restructured, providing much easier access
  to OLAC information and documents.  Please see it for yourself by visiting
  http://www.language-archives.org/.  We welcome your feedback.

OLAC LAUNCH

  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, 3-6 January 2002.  The symposium will include
  presentations from Helen Aristar-Dry, Gary Simons, Megan Crowhurst,
  Chu-Ren Huang, Brian MacWhinney, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven
  Bird.  The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC metadata set for a
  one year period of experimentation.

OLAC SEARCH ENGINE

  The OLAC prototype search engine now harvests 9,000+ records from ten
  archives: LDC, ELRA, DFKI, TDProject, Perseus, ANLC, APS, LACITO, CBOLD
  and AISRI.  Test it out using the search field at the top of the OLAC
  pages.  (In time this engine will be hosted at linguistlist.org).

NSF E-MELD PROJECT

  Anthony Aristar at Wayne State University and colleagues at Eastern
  Michigan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University
  of Arizona, have been awarded a $2 million NSF grant to develop a public
  digital archive of endangered language data.  The archive will employ
  OLAC metadata.

OLAC PRESENTED IN EUROPE AND ASIA

  OLAC was presented in a workshop at the 39th Annual Meeting of the
  Association for Computational Linguistics (Toulouse, July).  Next month,
  OLAC will be presented by Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in a
  workshop at the 6th Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
  (Tokyo, November 2001).


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 gary_simons at sil.org  Mon Oct 22 21:40:06 2001
From: gary_simons at sil.org (Gary Simons)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 17:40:06 -0400
Subject: New draft of OLAC Metadata Set document
Message-ID: <MON.22.OCT.2001.174006.0400.OLACGENERAL@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

Dear community,

We have just posted a new draft of the document describing the
proposed metadata set for the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC).
This is the foundational document that lays out the standards that
participating archives would follow when generating XML descriptions
of their language resources.  The URL is:

   http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms-20011022.html

This replaces the previous version which was issued on June 16. This
release of the metadata document coincides with the release of version
0.4 of the XML schema for OLAC metadata. All known inconsistencies
between the prior versions of both have been rectified.  Steven is
posting the details of what has changed in the schema to the
OLAC-Implementers list.

This is a summary of the changes as listed in the document header:

   1. Adds scheme attribute (see sections 1 and 2).
   2. The lang attribute on <olac> is renamed to langs.
   3. Adds alternative as a possible refinement for Title so
 that the
      original title can be distinguished from translations.
   4. Type.data is renamed as Type.linguistic.
   5. Significant addition to discussion of Coverage.
   6. Numerous minor editorial revisions.




If the definitions in the document are not adequate to help you
determine how to use a particular element, if you don't agree with a
definition, if you think of a case that should be addressed in an
example, or another kind of reaction that will help to improve the
document,  then please give us feedback! Also, take special note of
the "To do" comments in red; if you could give some help in any of
those matters we'd be happy for volunteers!

We hope to hear from some of you. Your participation and feedback is
essential for building a metadata standard that will truly meet the
needs of our community.

Best wishes,

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)