The GOLD Community of Practice: an infrastructure for linguistic data on the Web

Abstract

The GOLD Community of Practice is proposed as a model for managing on-line linguistic data. The key components of the model include the linguistic data resources themselves and those focused on the knowledge derived from data. Data resources include the ever-increasing amount of linguistic field data and other descriptive language resources being migrated to the Web. The knowledge resources capture generalizations about the data and are anchored in the General Ontology for Linguistic Description, or 'GOLD'. It is argued that such a model is in the spirit of the vision for a Semantic Web and, thus, provides a concrete methodology for rendering highly divergent resources interoperable. Furthermore, a methodology is given for creating specific communities of practice within the overall scientific domain of linguistics. A number of services around the model are proposed including knowledge acquisition and search facilities. Finally, as an example of the model's utility, an instantiation of a community of practice centered around interlinear glossed text is described.

A New Method for Interoperability Between Lexical Resources Using MDA Approach

“…The GOLD ontology contains the basis linguistic knowledge of any theoretical framework. According to (Farrar and Lewis, 2005), GOLD defines linguistic knowledge as axioms, for example "a verb is a part of speech", and uses at the same time language neutral, for example "parts of speech are subclasses of gold: GrammaticalUnit". The classes are presented in the protégée editor and then expressed as concepts in the GOLD ontology (Farrar and Langendoen, 2003).…”

“…Thus, GOLD is an abstract model and representation formalisms such as HPSG are the instantiation of this abstract model. (Farrar and Lewis, 2005) consider these instantiations as sub-communities of practice noted Communities Of Practice Extension (COPEs). COPEs, sub-communities or sub-ontologies designed the same nomenclature and extend the overall GOLD ontology (Wilcock, 2007).…”

ODIN: A Model for Adapting and Enriching Legacy Infrastructure

“…ODIN was developed as part of the greater effort within the GOLD Community of Practice [10] 2 and the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data efforts 3 , whose goals are to promote best practice standards and software, specif-ically those that facilitate interoperation over disparate sets of linguistic data. ODIN's genesis came from the realization that despite the fact that significant amounts of language data are being posted and maintained on the Web, there is no uniform search strategy for discovering these data, and most that can be discovered cannot be easily manipulated or used.…”

“…The initial search strategy behind ODIN was to comply with the Open Languages Archives Community (OLAC) model [19], that is, allow search by language name or code, either through OLAC's search interfaces 10 or through a locally provided facility. IGT, however, has remarkably rich content that opens possibilities for other types of search.…”

An ontology for accessing transcription systems

“…It includes general knowledge of writing systems and transcription systems that are core to the General Ontology of Linguistic Description (GOLD) 2 (Farrar and Langendoen 2003). Other portions of OATS, including the relationships encoded for relating segments of transcription systems, or the computational representations of these elements, extend GOLD as a Community of Practice Extension (COPE) (Farrar and Lewis 2005). OATS provides interoperability for transcription systems and practical orthographies that map phones and phonemes in unique relationships to their graphemic representations.…”