Developing a Preservation Metadata Standard for Languages

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of developing a dedicated preservation metadata standard for languages to prevent their extinction, by analyzing existing archaeological metadata standards for potential adaptation.

Contribution

The paper introduces the need for a specialized language preservation metadata standard and explores existing archaeological standards for potential mapping and application.

Findings

Identified a lack of preservation metadata standards specifically for languages.

Selected three archaeological metadata standards for potential adaptation.

Highlighted the necessity of metadata for language preservation and retrieval.

Abstract

We have so many languages to communicate with others as humans. There are approximately 7000 languages in the world, and many are becoming extinct for a variety of reasons. In order to preserve and prevent the extinction of these languages, we need to preserve them. One way of preservation is to have a preservation metadata for languages. Metadata is data about data. Metadata is required for item description, preservation, and retrieval. There are various types of metadata, e.g., descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, etc. After the literature study, the authors observed that there is a lack of study on the preservation metadata for language. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the need for language preservation metadata. We found some archaeological metadata standards for this purpose, and after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, we chose three archaeological metadata standards, namely: Archaeon-core, CARARE, and LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) for mapping metadata.