The Open Language Archives Community and Asian Language Resources

TL;DR

This paper introduces OLAC, a global system for language archives, emphasizing its application in Asia for better documentation and discovery of language resources and tools.

Contribution

It presents OLAC and its metadata standards, focusing on adapting language and multilingual resource classification for the Asian context.

Findings

OLAC facilitates discovery of language resources globally.

Metadata standards improve resource documentation.

Asian language classification presents unique challenges.

Abstract

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is a new project to build a worldwide system of federated language archives based on the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. This paper aims to disseminate the OLAC vision to the language resources community in Asia, and to show language technologists and linguists how they can document their tools and data in such a way that others can easily discover them. We describe OLAC and the OLAC Metadata Set, then discuss two key issues in the Asian context: language classification and multilingual resource classification.