Table of Contents
e-Linguistics is an instantiation of a cyber-infrastructure for linguistics. It holds that the Web is primary medium of sharing, manipulating and searching linguistics data. The idea for an e-Linguistics came about because of the need for data sharing especially in the context of the decline of linguistic diversity and the rapid loss of language data. As such e-Linguistics is meant to promote a paradigm shift within the field of linguistics where data are:
- interoperable
- shared
- open
Interoperable means that a single piece of software can be used to process multiple data sets, collected by different linguists and marked up according to different theoretical perspectives.
Shared means that data are accessible to both the scientific and native language speaking communities.
Open means that annotation schemes are published via the use of standard terminologies or ontologies.
The roadmap to e-Linguistics necessarily concerns the effective use of current Web technologies. Several initiatives outside the field of linguistics are relevant here:
- W3C -- a promoter of Web standards
- LinkedData -- an initiative that provides concrete examples for the creation of a Semantic Web for individual scientific fields
- NSF Cyberinfrastructure
And within linguistics:
- LinguistList -- a main promoter of open and interoperable linguistics data
- Cyberling -- a virtual meeting space for the community of linguists interested in expanding the cyberinfrastructure
The following projects are maintained with a specific eye towards e-Linguistics as defined above:
- The GOLD Community of Practice (GOLDComm) -- an infrastructure for linguistics data that rely on the General Ontology for Linguistic Description
- The e-Linguistics Toolkit (ELTK) -- a suite of tools for migrating linguistics data to RDF and GOLD
GOLDComm and the ELTK are intended to be used together for migrating data in legacy formats to an interoperable framework. See this explanation for the specifics of how these projects fit together.
We would like to gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support in developing these tools, specifically for the following grants: