Call for Participation: OLAC Workshop

[Steven Bird]

		    WORKSHOP ON OPEN LANGUAGE ARCHIVES
	    Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS)
		 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
			   December 10-12, 2002

	   Sponsored by the National Science Foundation project:
	  International Standards in Language Engineering (ISLE)


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 and the
protocol.  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.


WORKSHOP GOALS

The workshop will be tightly focussed on the following goals:

1. Standards: To revise the three proposed standards, the OLAC
   Metadata Set, the OLAC Process document and the OLAC Protocol.

2. Vocabularies: To finalize the controlled vocabularies: linguistic
   type, software functionality, rights, format, encoding, ...

3. Review: To give feedback to each participating archive on its use
   of metadata, to review the services on the OLAC and LINGUIST sites.

4. Proposals: 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.

In support of these goals, the workshop will consist of:
* group discussions, both plenary and in parallel working groups;
* review/editing of documents, both in working groups and in private;
* plus a limited number of presentations (cf goal 4).

NB. No time will be allocated for project reports in the formal program.


PARTICIPATION

The workshop is open to advisory board members and representatives of
participating archives, consistent with our core value of "Empowering
the Players" [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html].

*** Please communicate your intention to participate by October 1.

NB. If you have been thinking about becoming an OLAC data provider, now
would be a good time to act. Any archive that becomes a data provider
by October 1 will also be invited to participate in this foundation
setting workshop.  For more information on becoming a data provider,
please see http://www.language-archives.org/docs/implement.html


SPONSORSHIP

The workshop is being sponsored by the NSF ISLE project "International
Standards in Language Engineering".  We have funding for accomodation
at the University Sheraton, a short walk from IRCS.  No registration
fee will be charged.  Some travel support may also be available.


PREPARATORY TASKS

In order to ensure that the workshop achieves its goals, participants
will be expected to help create, review and edit draft documents ahead
of the meeting.  We would like each person to contribute 1-2 days
each month to this effort from September onwards.  The preparatory tasks
correspond to our workshop goals, and are as follows:

1. Standards: review all the standards documents and suggest revisions

2. Vocabularies: review some of the controlled vocabularies and
   suggest revisions

3. Review: choose three participating archives besides your own and
   suggest improvements to their use of metadata; review the
   www.language-archives.org site and the www.linguistlist.org/olac/
   service and suggest improvements.

4. Proposals: draft an encoding scheme, an implementation note, a
   best practice recommendation, or a proposal for anything else that
   needs to be done, and present it to the group.

The success of the workshop will depend on active participation in
these tasks.  Comments circulated in advance will have the most impact
on our work.  To facilitate the process we will use this list,
OLAC-Implementers, except where formal working groups have already
been established with their own lists.  Note that OLAC-Implementers is
an open, unmoderated list, archived on the LINGUIST site at:
http://lists.linguistlist.org/archives/olac-implementers.html

More information will be circulated in September.  In the meantime,
please feel free to get started on any of the above tasks...

Steven Bird & Gary Simons