Building an Open Language Archives Community on the OAI Foundation

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of an extensible metadata profile and virtual tools to facilitate a global language resource archive community, overcoming technical barriers and enhancing resource description precision.

Contribution

It introduces new solutions like an application profile and virtual data/service providers that enable easier participation in the OLAC community.

Findings

Developed an extensible application profile for language metadata.

Implemented Vida and Viser to lower technical barriers for community participation.

Solutions are generic and adaptable to other specialized communities.

Abstract

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources. The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the OAI Protocol have provided a solid foundation for the OLAC framework. However, we need more precision in community-specific aspects of resource description than is offered by DC. Furthermore, many of the institutions and individuals who might participate in OLAC do not have the technical resources to support the OAI protocol. This paper presents our solutions to these two problems. To address the first, we have developed an extensible application profile for language resource metadata. To address the second, we have implemented Vida (the virtual data provider) and Viser (the virtual service provider), which permit community members to provide data and services without having to implement the OAI protocol. These solutions are generic and could be adopted by other specialized subcommunities.