June 20, 2006E-MELD 2006, MSU1 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…