XML has been designed for creating structured documents, but the information that is encoded in these structures are, by definition, out of scope for XML. Additional sources, normally not easily interpretable by computers, such as documentation are needed to determine the intention of specific tags in a tag-set. The Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) takes a rather pragmatic approach to foster interoperability between XML instances in the domain of metadata descriptions for language resources. This paper gives an overview of this approach.

We report on finished work in a project that is concerned with providing methods, tools, best practice guidelines, and solutions for sustainable linguistic resources. The article discusses several general aspects of sustainability and introduces an approach to normalizing corpus data and metadata records. Moreover, the architecture of the sustainability platform implemented by the authors is described.

The paper discusses two topics: firstly an approach of using multiple layers of annotation is sketched out. Regarding the XML representation this approach is similar to standoff annotation. A second topic is the use of heterogeneous linguistic resources (e.g., XML annotated documents, taggers, lexical nets) as a source for semiautomatic multi-dimensional markup to resolve typical linguistic issues, dealing with anaphora resolution as a case study. 1

IntroductionThis paper discusses work on the sustainability of linguistic resources as it was conducted in various projects, including the work of a three year project Sustainability o f Linguistic Resources which finished in December 2008, a follow-up project, Sustainable linguistic data, and initiatives related to the work of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) on developing standards for linguistic resources. The individual projects have been conducted at German collaborative research centres at the Universities of Potsdam, Hamburg and Tübingen, where the sustainability work was coordinated.Today, most language resources are represented in XML. The representation of data in XML is an important prerequisite for long-term preservation but a reasonable representation format such as XML alone is not sufficient. Though XML is being said to be human-readable it is obvious that legibility is a rather problematic notion in terms of photos encoded in SVG, complex structures generated from data dumps of databases and other applications or even formats such as Office Open XML. In the linguistic data community, various flavours of stand-off annotation also demonstrate the complexity of the problem.Usually these data formats are not meant to be read by humans, though the advantages mentioned in XMLintroductions still hold, namely, that data modelled according to the standardized and continuously maintained XML formalism can be read and analysed by human users to re-engineer tools using simple parsers for validation and mental effort. Case Study: The Project "Sustainability of Linguistic Resources"This section briefly presents SPLICR, the Web-based Sustainability Platform for Linguistic Corpora and Resources aimed at researchers who work in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics: a comprehensive database of metadata records can be explored and searched in order to find language resources that could be appropriate for one's specific research needs. SPLICR also provides a graphical interface that enables users to query and to visualise corpora.The project in which SPLICR was developed aimed at sustainably archiving the language resources that were constructed in three collaborative research centres. The groups in Tübingen (SFB 441: "Linguistic Data Structures"), Hamburg (SFB 538: "Multilingualism"), and Potsdam/Berlin (SFB 632: "Information Structure") built a total of 56 resources -corpora and treebanks mostly. According to our estimates it took more than one hundred person years to collect and to amiotate these datasets. The project had two main goals: (a) To process and to sustainably archive the resources so that they are still available to the research community and other interested parties in five, ten, or even 20 years time, (b) To enable researchers to query the resources both on the level of their metadata as well as on the level of linguistic annotations. In more general terms, the main goal was to enable solutions that leverage the interoperability, reusability, and sustainability of a large ...

Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars.