OLAC Workshop, Philadelphia, 10-12 December 2002

[Steven Bird]

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)