News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

[Steven Bird]

Dear Community,

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) has seen some significant
developments since our last general news update in December.  Here is
an update on the ongoing activities.

EUROPEAN LAUNCH ON 29 MAY AT LREC

   OLAC will be officially launched in Europe at an OLAC symposium to take
   place at the 3rd Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, in the
   Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, in Las Palmas, Spain, Wednesday 29 May 2002
   (14:40-16:40). The symposium will include presentations from Antonio
   Zampolli, Helen Aristar-Dry, Gary Simons, Hans Uszkoreit, Martin Wynne,
   Laurent Romary, Steven Bird and Nicholas Ostler.

   Also at LREC there will a series of discussions on OLAC controlled
   vocabularies, to take place on Thursday 30 May, as follows:
   1. Language codes      9:45-10:45
   2. Type.functionality  11:00-13:00
   3. Type.linguistic     14:40-16:40
   For each session we will meet at the east end of the foyer, then find
   a suitable location (unfortunately the organizers could not assign us a
   room in advance).

NEW ARCHIVES JOIN OLAC

   Several more language archives are now participating in OLAC, bringing
   the total to 19.  The new archives are:

   Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
   Curators: Laurent Romary and Zina Tucsnak (ATILF)

   Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
   Curators: Leanne Hinton and Laura Buszard-Welcher (UC Berkeley)

   Academia Sinica archives of Formosan and Early Mandarin
   Curators: Chu-Ren Huang, Arthur Ya-Ning Chen, Sophy Chen (Academia Sinica)

   TalkBank: A Multimodal Database of Communicative Interaction
             (includes the CHILDES database)
   Curators: Brian MacWhinney, Romeo Anghelache (CMU)

   Rosetta Project 1000 Language Archive
   Curators: Jim Mason (Long Now Foundation)

   For more information about participating archives, please see:
   http://www.language-archives.org/organization.html

OLAC SERVICES SOON TO BE LAUNCHED ON LINGUIST SITE

   LINGUIST List will shortly announce their new OLAC search engine and
   metadata editor.  The service incorporates the OLAC harvester and
   repository editor developed by Eva Banik and Alan Lee at the LDC.
   You can try out the repository editor prototype (ORE) at:
   http://www.language-archives.org/tools/ore/

LANGUAGE CODES WORKING GROUP: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

   The OLAC Working Group on Language Codes will create OLAC standards
   concerning language code vocabularies and their management.  In scope
   are all human languages, living, recently extinct, ancient and
   constructed. Constructed languages include proto languages and
   artificial languages. Out of scope is the classification of languages
   into language families.

   The group has three working drafts:
   1. LINGUIST Codes for Ancient and Constructed Languages (A. Aristar)
   2. SIL Three-letter Codes for Identifying Languages:
       Migrating from in-house standard to community standard (G. Simons)
   3. Managing LINGUIST Codes for Ancient and Constructed Languages (A. Aristar)

   The group will conduct its work on the EMELD-CODES 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/language-codes/

REGISTRATION FOR OLAC ARCHIVES

   A new validation and registration service has been set up for would-be
   archives, which automatically checks the requirements of the OLAC
   Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.  For more information, please see:
   http://www.language-archives.org/register/archive.html

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)