News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

[Steven Bird]

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)