E-MELD Endangered Language Documentation Workshop

[Naomi Fox]

Members of the list may be interested in participating in the upcoming
E-MELD workshop in July. Please note the appended call for participation as
well as the call for papers. Feel free to email me at fox at linguistlist.org
or the organizing group at emeld at linguistlist.org for further details.

--Naomi Fox

The E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data) Project
is a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation with a dual
objective: to aid in the preservation of endangered languages data and
documentation and to aid in the development of the infrastructure necessary
for effective collaboration among electronic archives. As part of the effort
to promote consensus on best practices in digital language documentation,
E-MELD is hosting its 2005 workshop from July 1-3, 2005 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The E-MELD workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2005
LSA Linguistic Institute.

E-MELD 2005: Linguistic Ontologies and Data Categories in
Morphosyntactic Annotation

Date: 01-Jul-2005 - 03-Jul-2005
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Contact Person: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>
Meeting Email: emeld at linguistlist.org
Web Site: http://emeld.org/workshop/2005/

*Please note the venue and date change.*

Call Deadline: 28-Mar-2005

The 2005 E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data)
workshop on digital language documentation, sponsored by the National
Science Foundation, is entitled 'Linguistic Ontologies and Data Categories
in Morphosyntactic Annotation.' The goal of the workshop is to invite
community participation in the development of GOLD, the General Ontology for
Linguistic Description developed by the E-MELD team at U. of Arizona (see
detailed description in the Call for Papers). However we welcome
participation by all linguists interested in morphosyntactic annotation
and/or the use of ontologies in linguistic description.

AMPLIFIED MEETING DESCRIPTION

This workshop will debut our vision for the ''GOLD Community'', an
international partnership of institutions and individuals who will build a
global infrastructure to make our combined knowledge of the world's
languages fully accessible and interoperable. It is based on the model used
for the creation of OLAC, the Open Language Archive Community, and is
intended to extend OLAC's scope of interoperability from metadata to data,
i.e. the actual content of the linguistic resources discoverable through
metadata. The core element of this infrastructure is GOLD, the General
Ontology for Linguistic Description, which has been under development for
three years by a team of E-MELD researchers who were initially based at the
University of Arizona. In addition, standards will be required for linking
language resources to GOLD and for making extensions to GOLD that reflect
the consensus of specific ''communities of practice'', from a single
researcher working on a single language to a network of researchers doing
large-scale comparative or typological work. Finally, tools and services
will be needed that are based on those standards to enable researchers to
create those links and extensions, and to execute queries and searches over
the resources made interoperable through their connection to GOLD.

To date, most of the work on GOLD has been on its overall design, and on the
characterization of the features used in morphosyntactic annotation, and has
been carried out without review by linguists working outside of the E-MELD
project. In this workshop, we invite community review of GOLD and
nvolvement in the design and creation of the infrastructure needed to make
the vision described above a reality. As with OLAC, we envision a follow-up
meeting in six months' or a year's time, at which the GOLD Community will be
officially ''launched'', with the standards that have been developed up to
that point frozen, so that tool builders and service providers will have an
opportunity to create tools and services in a stable environment, and come
up with recommendations for changes and additions to those standards.

For more information about GOLD, see:
http://www.linguistics-ontology.org
http://emeld.org/tools/ontology.cfm

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

If you use morphological terms, you will be interested to know which ones
have been proposed for GOLD. This emerging standard will allow comparison
across large sets of languages with specified ways of determining
morphological categories. If you have a particularly challenging set of
phenomena that you are sure are not yet covered, please bring it to a
working group on the ontology. If you are concerned about making linguistics
more coherent and explicit, please plan to attend a working group. Limited
support may be available for workshop participants selected in advance.
Please submit a short description of your work or research interests related
to the themes of the workshop.

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION: emeld at linguistlist.org.
LENGTH: 300 words maximum.
DEADLINE: Mar 28, 2005.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The workshop will begin with invited papers that explain how GOLD works and
lay out the vision for a community of practice built around it. In addition
we are soliciting papers on the theme of ontologies, and in particular
linguistic ontologies, that could inform the foundation of the GOLD
Community. Topics might include:
- the nature of linguistic ontologies in general;
- the place of linguistic concepts within existing upper ontologies;
- specifications for the ontology of linguistic subdomains that are not yet
covered by GOLD;
- lessons learned in trying to apply GOLD to the annotation of linguistic
resources;
- reports on attempts to build tools or services based on GOLD;
- methods of markup for linking resources to an ontology;
- requirements for tools or services that will be needed by the GOLD community;
- exploration of the ''smart search'' capabilities that a linguistic
ontology will enable.

If you would like to make a 20 minute presentation at the workshop on such a
topic, please send an abstract in Word, pdf, or plain text format to the
organizing committee.

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSIONS: emeld at linguistlist.org.
LENGTH: 500 words maximum.
DEADLINE: Mar 28, 2005.

Authors whose presentations are selected will be required to submit the full
text of the paper by May 15, 2005, so that it can be published on the
workshop website prior to the workshop itself.