17.3511, FYI: BNC XML EDITION: Now Available for Beta Test

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3511. Tue Nov 28 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3511, FYI: BNC XML EDITION: Now Available for Beta Test

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1)
Date: 27-Nov-2006
From: Ylva Berglund < ylva.berglund at oucs.ox.ac.uk >
Subject: BNC XML EDITION: Now Available for Beta Test 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:36:17
From: Ylva Berglund < ylva.berglund at oucs.ox.ac.uk >
Subject: BNC XML EDITION: Now Available for Beta Test 
 


Work is nearly complete on the new XML edition of the British National
Corpus and we are now looking for beta-testers to give us feedback on an
online version, before we start distribution on DVD early in the new year. 

If you or your institution already has a BNC licence, you're entitled to
participate in the beta test programme. Just send me a note expressing your
interest and I will send you a password and other details of how to access
the beta-test server. 

The trial online service will run until Dec 31st, but we would like to have
reports from users before then, so that we have time to act on them. We're
looking for information about things that can be improved in either the
corpus itself or the Xaira software, particularly if there are aspects of
either which seem to be definitely broken. We are not expecting to get
every error and spelling mistake out of the corpus -- after several months
attempting to clean up the most conspicuous of these we know that's a
hopeless task -- but we do want to be reasonably confident that we've made
it good enough to satisfy most people's requirements. And we're not
expecting that Xaira can be made to do everything that everyone wants
optimally -- one of the main motivations of going to XML is to make it
easier for other software tools to be used with the corpus -- but we would
like to know that it performs well enough to satisfy a substantial
proportion of corpus users and doesn't have too many bugs in it! 

If you would like to help, you just need some experience of using Windows
(sorry, this trial is for Windows users only, though Xaira will now run on
other platforms) and you need to have a reliable internet connexion. Some
previous experience of Xaira is advantageous but not essential. 

While the testing proceeds, we'll be working on finalising the
documentation and packaging the corpus for release, hopefully in January. 

Ylva, on behalf of the BNC team 

-------------------
Dr Ylva Berglund
British National Corpus
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Rd
Oxford OX2 6NN
Tel: 01865 283686
URL: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Email: natcorp at oucs.ox.ac.uk 



Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics





 




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