From sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Jul 16 20:50:14 2002 From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird) Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 16:50:14 EDT Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Message-ID: Dear Community, Here is an update on OLAC activities since our last general news in May. OLAC IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN The August 2002 issue of Scientific American has an article called Saving Dying Languages which includes a discussion of OLAC. See the website for more information. OLAC WORKING GROUP ON LINGUISTIC TYPES: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION The OLAC Working Group on Linguistic Data Types will create the OLAC-Linguistic-Type vocabulary that describes the nature or genre of the content of a language resource from a linguistic standpoint. The group has the following working draft: OLAC Linguistic Data Type Vocabulary (Heidi Johnson and Helen Aristar Dry) The group is conducting its work on the METADATA mailing list which is hosted on the LINGUIST site. To learn more and to join the group, please see: http://www.language-archives.org/wg/linguistic-type/ EUROPEAN LAUNCH IN MAY AT LREC OLAC was officially launched in Europe at the 3rd Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Spain, in May. The symposium included presentations by Gary Simons, Helen Aristar-Dry, Hans Uszkoreit, Martin Wynne, Laurent Romary, Steven Bird and Nicholas Ostler. Presentation materials are posted on the OLAC website at: http://www.language-archives.org/docs/eu-launch.html BUILDING OLAC INFRASTRUCTURE In the last two months some new technical services have been set up on the OLAC site. 1. OLAC Harvester - a Perl package that anyone can use to harvest the records from OLAC archives and store them in a local database, and provide a community service based on the data. [http://lists.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0205&L=olac-implementers] 2. OLAC Aggregator - a special OLAC data provider which contains the metadata from all the other 20+ registered OLAC archives. Service providers can now go to one location to harvest all OLAC metadata. [http://lists.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0206&L=olac-implementers] 3. OLAC Web-Crawler Gateway - an OLAC service provider which contains the metadata from all the other 20+ registered OLAC archives. The web-crawler gateway exports each OLAC metadata record as an HTML document, permitting it to be indexed by web search engines. [http://lists.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0207&L=olac-implementers] 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 Sat Jul 27 01:41:58 2002 From: sb at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Steven Bird) Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 21:41:58 EDT Subject: OLAC Workshop, Philadelphia, 10-12 December 2002 Message-ID: WORKSHOP ON OPEN LANGUAGE ARCHIVES IRCS, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, December 10-12, 2002 OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, was founded at the Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description, in December 2000. During 2001, the OLAC development phase, the core infrastructure for OLAC was built and alpha testers implemented data providers. During 2002, the pilot phase, we froze the standards to encourage wider adoption and experience with the metadata, controlled vocabularies, the protocol and the OLAC process. At the close of 2002 we want to draw together all this experience, make final revisions, and launch the operational phase. With this launch, the OLAC standards will be promoted from "candidate" to "adopted", and version 1.0 of the OLAC XML schemas will be released. The workshop will be tightly focussed on the following goals: * To revise the three proposed standards, the OLAC Metadata Set, the OLAC Process document and the OLAC Protocol. * To finalize the controlled vocabularies: linguistic type, software functionality, rights, format, encoding, ... * To give feedback to each participating archive on its use of metadata, to review the services on the OLAC and LINGUIST sites. * To hear new proposals for working groups, encoding schemes, implementation notes and best practice recommendations, and position papers on work that still needs to be done. We hope to have participants representing each OLAC archive, along with members of the OLAC advisory board. FOR MORE INFORMATION... Full details about the workshop will soon be posted to the OLAC-Implementers mailing list. Subscription information is available at: http://www.language-archives.org/community.html Steven Bird & Gary Simons ________ 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)