June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 1

Toward Implementation of Best Practice:

Anthony Aristar, Wayne State University

Other E-MELD Outcomes

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 2

Background: Infrastructure for endangered language documentation

The situation as it was…

Legacy practices

Legacy tools

Legacy data

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 3

Background: Infrastructure for endangered language documentation

Infrastructure needed Recommendations of best practices Advice on implementation Standards specific to language

documentation Tools to facilitate conformance to

standards Communities to develop and maintain

standards

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 4

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Basic Structure of E-MELD: E-MELD working groups formulated

recommendations The School of Best Practices in Digital Language

Documentation, which addressed three needs: Publicized and explained recommendations of best

practice Provided advice on how to follow the

recommendations Provided data in best practice format

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 5

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

More specifically… School of Best Practices presents

recommendations for: Media types: Audio, video, text, images Documentation types: Annotations, lexicons,

Interlinear glossed text Technologies: Unicode, XML, stylesheets,

software, conversion Preservation: Metadata, archives, ethics

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 6

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

School provides advice on implementation

Reading room: Annotated bibliography and links

Tool room: Software and hardware reviews All sorts of advice also found in the classroom,

especially in the ways it contextualizes recommendations

Case studies also offer lots of advice, especially for migration of legacy data to best-practice formats

How-to pages

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 7

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Data: Case studies not only had educational role but

also resulted in migration of data of ten languages from legacy formats to best-practice formats

Training: Many students trained in digitization and

documentation, as well as field work.

School of Best Practices

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 8

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Standards (reviewed in Lewis’s talk) Interlinear glossed text: Bow, Bird, and

Hughes, 2003 E-MELD Proceedings Lexicon schemata General Ontology for Linguistic Description Unicode Various other proposals made at E-MELD

conferences

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 9

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Tools OLAC Repository Editor (metadata creation

and editing) CharWrite (Unicode character entry) FIELD (lexical data input and analysis) OntoElan (ontology-sensitive annotation) OntoGloss (Ontology-based annotator) Web-based tools facilitating interaction with

the School

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 10

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Communities Support for the OLAC community Formation of the GOLD Community for

linguists interested in the development of a general linguistics ontology and standards and tools for ontology-aware resource creation

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 11

Progress: E-MELD 2001–2006

Communities Formation of an “E-MELD community”,

consisting of documentary and descriptive linguistics, computational linguists, software developers, and many others.

Attempted to bridge gaps between the European, American, Australian, African, and Asian computer-assisted linguistics communities

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 12

The Future of E-MELD?

Possibilities for the future?

Deciding once and for all: E-MELD or EMELD?

Further work on legacy data migration

Ensuring the advice and recommendations in the School remains up-to-date

Further standards development: following up on proposals already made and encouraging new proposals areas not yet examined

Creating new tools, obviously, but what kind and for what?

Maintaining the E-MELD community, establishing needed new communities

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 13

How should we move forward?

Legacy data 1. More advice on how to migrate legacy data

to best practice formats

2. Conversion tools for Legacy lexicons to best-practice lexicons Legacy texts to best-practice texts Legacy audio and video to best-practice audio

and video

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 14

How should we move forward? More metadata compliance, at least:

Time & place Type of speech event Participants Language(s)

Best practice: use OLAC or IMDI metadata standard for interoperability

OLAC = Open Language Archives Community: 15 element metadata standard developed for language resources

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 15

How should we move forward?

Standards development Developing further standards for

Lexicons Texts Grammatical annotations

Further ontology development Further metadata standards development

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 16

How should we move forward?

Tool development Developing and refining tools for

Lexicon creation Text creation Grammatical annotation

Developing and refining metadata creation tools

Resource conversion and transformation

June 20, 2006 E-MELD 2006, MSU 17

Conclusion

You will have your chance to voice your feelings on these issues…