This is several weeks old now, but may still be news of interest to some
on this list.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
----- Forwarded by Peter Constable/IntlAdmin/WCT on 02/12/2002 02:23 AM
-----
Steven Bird <sb@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent by: OLAC General List <OLAC-GENERAL@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
12/31/2001 02:43 PM
Please respond to Steven Bird
To: OLAC-GENERAL@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
cc:
Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
Dear Community,
OLAC is now one year old, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank
you for your support and to update you on recent developments.
OLAC LAUNCH THIS FRIDAY
OLAC will be officially launched at an OLAC symposium to take place at
the 76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in the
San
Francisco Hyatt Regency, on Friday 4 January 2002. The symposium will
include presentations from Gary Simons, Helen Aristar-Dry, Megan
Crowhurst, Chu-Ren Huang, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven Bird.
The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC standards for a one year
period, to make it easy for prospective participants to implement the
standards without having to worry about aiming at a moving target.
(However we will continue to develop the vocabularies).
OLAC OPEN HOUSE
Also at the LSA there will be an informal discussion and demonstration
session for prospective OLAC archives (Saturday 2-3:30pm). Be sure to
stop by if you would like to learn more about OLAC infrastructure and
how you can participate by contributing your own metadata.
OLAC SEARCH ENGINE AT LINGUIST
LINGUIST list has recently announced their OLAC service provider. It
uses the OLAC harvester developed by Eva Banik at the LDC, along with
their own user interface (see the OLAC page for pointers). This
step represents a significant milestone in the adoption of OLAC by
the linguistics community, and will be an inducement to more archives
to contribute their metadata. Our thanks to the wonderful folks at
LINGUIST!
SIL ETHNOLOGUE JOINS OLAC
The Ethnologue database of the world's languages now has an OLAC
interface, and can be accessed via any OLAC service provider. With
this addition of 7,000+ records, OLAC now boasts over 18,000 records.
These records come from 13 archives in five countries (US, UK, France,
Germany, Netherlands).
OLAC SUPPORT FOR THE WIDER LANGUAGE RESOURCES COMMUNITY
The Open Language Archives Community seeks to embrace all members of
the
language resources community, from well-established institutional
archives to individuals who want to share research results. Would-be
participants thus operate in a wide variety of circumstances. In order
to ensure that the barrier to participation should be as low as
possible, OLAC provides three approaches to becoming an OLAC data
provider.
1. Conventional OAI Data Provider: The data provider implements a
software interface to an existing catalog database that permits
metadata to be harvested via an HTTP-based protocol.
2. Vida, the Virtual Data Provider, is an OLAC service that provides
the harvesting protocol for metadata repositories that are expressed
as XML documents.
3. ORE, the OLAC Repository Editor, is a form-based editor on the OLAC
Web site that allows a user to construct a small metadata repository
that will be serviced by Vida.
Prototypes of Vida and ORE are available on the OLAC website, in a link
from the main page "Becoming an OLAC Data Provider". These systems
will
be demonstrated at the LSA.
REGISTRATION FOR OLAC PARTICIPATING ARCHIVES AND SERVICES
New registration pages have been set up for would-be archives and
services, to streamline the expansion process. Please see the
COMMUNITY
section of the OLAC website for pointers.
PROGRESS ON OLAC STANDARDS
OLAC standards describe the working of OLAC infrastructure, the
procedures that participating archives and services must follow
in order to co-operate effectively. These documents are undergoing
community review and will shortly be promoted to "candidate status"
while they undergo widespread testing as a prelude to full adoption
as a standard.
OLAC Process:
- summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC (i.e. the purpose, vision,
and core values) and then describes how OLAC is organized and how
it operates [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html]
OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting:
- defines the protocol OLAC service providers use to harvest metadata
from OLAC data providers. It defines the responses that OLAC data
providers must make to the requests of the protocol
[http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/protocol.html]
OLAC Metadata set:
- specifies the metadata set used by OLAC for the interchange of
metadata within the framework of the Open Archives Initiative
[http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms.html]
OLAC METADATA SET DOCUMENT TRANSLATED INTO CHINESE
Chu-Ren Huang, a member of the OLAC advisory board from Academia
Sinica,
Taiwan, has translated the metadata set document into Chinese, as part
of his efforts to encourage stronger participation in Asia. Pointers
can be found on the DOCS page
[http://www.language-archives.org/docs.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@ldc.upenn.edu)
Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons@sil.org)
OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)
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