“The Open Language Archives Community: An Infrastructure
for Distributed Archiving of Language Resources”
Gary
Simons
SIL International
gary_simons@sil.org
Steven
Bird
University of Pennsylvania
sb@ldc.upenn.edu
1. Introduction
A current trend in humanities computing is the explosion of digital resources and tools. It is clear that the new electronic media in conjunction with distribution via the World-Wide Web offer a degree of access to resources that is unparalleled in history. But there is a gap between what users want and what they can achieve today. For instance, potential users cannot necessarily find the material they are interested in, different data providers use different formats and conventions, the average researcher has no idea how to prepare materials for publication via this medium, to name just a few of the problems. A new direction for humanities computing would be for the community to organize its efforts so as to bridge this gap. This paper describes what one subcommunity, namely, those working with language-related resources, is doing in pursuit of this goal. The Open Language Archives Community was founded in December of 2000 with the following purpose statement: “OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (1) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (2) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.” This community involves both people and machines in cooperation. This paper describes the infrastructure that has been developed in order to support this cooperation. There are three aspects of infrastructure which are explained in the remaining sections:- a technical infrastructure that defines how participating machines interact with other participating machines,
- a governance infrastructure that defines how participating people interact with other participating people, and
- a usage infrastructure that defines how participating people interact with participating machines.
2. Technical infrastructure
The technical infrastructure for OLAC is built on an infrastructure developed within the digital libraries community by the Open Archives Initiative [OAI][2]. This infrastructure has two components: a metadata standard [OAI-DC] [3]and a metadata harvesting protocol [OAI-MHP] [4]. The OLAC versions of these are specializations that address the particular needs of language archiving. The two components of technical infrastructure are:- The OLAC Metadata Set [ OLAC-MS] [6] defines the elements to be used in metadata descriptions of archive holdings and how such descriptions are to be represented in XML for publication to the community. The OLAC metadata set contains the 15 elements of the Dublin Core metadata set [DC-MS] [1], plus 8 refined elements that capture information of special interest to the language resources community. In order to improve recall and precision when searching for resources, the standard also defines a number of controlled vocabularies for descriptor terms. The most important of these is a standard for identifying languages [ Simons, 2000] [8].
- The OLAC Metadata Harvesting Protocol [ OLAC-MHP] [5] defines the protocol by which machines that are "service providers" query the machines that are "data providers" in order to harvest the metadata records they publish. In this model, every participating archive is a data provider. Any other site may use the protocol to collect metadata records in order to provide a service, such as offering a union catalog of all archives or a specialized search service pertaining to a particular topic. The protocol is based on HTTP. Requests to data providers are issued via URLs with parameters; responses are returned as XML documents.
3. Governance infrastructure
The infrastructure that supports the interaction among the human participants of the Open Language Archives Community is defined in the OLAC process document [ OLAC-Process] [7]. It defines three things:- The governing ideas of OLAC. These are defined through a summary statement of its purpose, vision, and core values.
- The organization of OLAC. This is defined in terms of the groups of participants that play key roles: advisory board, participating archives and services, prospective participants, working groups, participating individuals, and coordinators.
- The operation of OLAC. It is through documents (such as standards and best practice recommendations) that OLAC defines itself and the practices that it promotes. The document process defines how documents are generated and how they progress from one status to the next along the five-phase life cycle of development, proposal, testing, adoption, and retirement.
4. Usage infrastructure
The infrastructure that has been built to allow the community of users interested in language resources to interact with the machines that provide services for this community has four major components:- A community gateway (hosted by the Linguistic Data Consortium at http://www.language-archives.org) provides access to all aspects of the community: news, documents, a directory of participants, links to service providers, resources for implementing data providers, and so on.
- A union catalog (to be hosted by Linguist List at http://www.linguistlist.org) of all records harvested from all OLAC data providers along with a full search engine.
- A language identification server ( hosted by SIL International at http://www.ethnologue.com) that documents the standard OLAC follows in identifying the 6,800+ living languages of the world.
- A proxied data provider (also hosted by the Linguistic Data Consortium) that gives individual researchers and small institutions that do not have the capacity to implement their own data provider an alternative way to publish their data and metadata as an OLAC archive.
5. Conclusion
During its first year of operation, 2001, the basic infrastructure for OLAC has been developed. By the end of that year, twelve institutions have become full participants and implemented data providers that publish a total of 18,000 metadata records. During the second year, 2002, the focus will be on enlarging the community of participating archives. The technical standards will be frozen in candidate status during that year so that archives need not worry about a moving target as they implement an OLAC data provider. Based on the experiences of the archives that participate in the first two years, the standards will be refined and formally adopted by the community during the third year, 2003. All individuals and institutions who have language-related resources to share are enthusiastically invited to take part in this new direction for humanities computing to build a distributed virtual library of digital resources for the documentation and study of human languages.unknown. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. : , 1999.
unknown. Open Archives Initiative. : ,
unknown. Schema for OAI implementation of Dublin Core metadata. : ,
unknown. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. : ,
unknown. OLAC Metadata Harvesting Protocol. : ,
unknown. OLAC Metadata Set. : ,
unknown. OLAC Process. : ,
Gary Simons. “Language identification in metadata descriptions of
language archive holdings.” Proceedings of the Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description 12-15 December 2000, Philadelphia, USA. : , 2000.