The Open Linguistics Working Group: Developing the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud

The Open Linguistics Working Group: Developing the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud John P. McCrae,1 Christian Chiarcos,2 Francis Bond,3 Philipp Cimiano,4 Thierry Declerck,5 Gerard de Melo,6 Jorge Gracia,7 Sebastian Hellmann,8 Bettina Klimek,8 Steven Moran,9 Petya Osenova,10 Antonio Pareja-Lora,11 Jonathan Pool12 1Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway, john@mccr.ae 2Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, chiarcos@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de 3Nanyang Technological University bond@ieee.org 4CIT-EC, Bielefeld University, cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de 5German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, declerck@dfki.de 6IIIS, Tsinghua University gdm@demelo.org 7Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, jgracia@fi.upm.es 8InfAI, Univesity of Leipzig, {hellmann, klimek}@informatik.uni-leipzig.de 9University of Zurich, steven.moran@uzh.ch 10IICT-BAS, petya@bultreebank.org 11Universidad Complutense de Madrid / ATLAS (UNED), aplora@ucm.es 12Long Now Foundation, pool@panlex.org Abstract The Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) brings together researchers from various fields of linguistics, natural language processing, and information technology to present and discuss principles, case studies, and best practices for representing, publishing and linking linguistic data collections. A major outcome of our work is the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud, an LOD (sub-)cloud of linguistic resources, which covers various linguistic databases, lexicons, corpora, terminologies, and metadata repositories. We present and summarize five years of progress on the development of the cloud and of advancements in open data in linguistics, and we describe recent community activities. The paper aims to serve as a guideline to introduce and involve researchers with the community and more generally with Linguistic Linked Open Data. Keywords: Linked Data, language resources, community groups 1. The Open Linguistics Working Group Linguistics, natural language processing, and related disci- plines share a fundamental interest in language resources and their availability beyond individual research groups. This is necessary not only to fullfill fundamental princi- ples of science (replicability), but also to facilitate subse- quent re-use of resources created from public funding, e.g., as training data for novel tools, as a basis to increase the amount of data available for quantitative analyses, or as a component of innovative applications. The latter may in- clude quite unforeseen uses, as in the case of the psycholin- guistic resource WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) turning into a significant component in numerous information technology systems. Publishing language resources under open licenses, to facil- itate exchange of knowledge and information across bound- aries between disciplines as well as between academia and the IT business, has thus been an area of increasing interest in academic circles, including applied linguistics, lexicog- raphy, computational linguistics, and information technol- ogy. Interested individuals began to organize themselves in the context of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)1, a community-based non-profit organization aiming to pro- mote open data. In 2010, we established the Open Linguis- tics Working Group (OWLG)2 of the Open Knowledge 1http://okfn.org/ 2http://linguistics.okfn.org Foundation as an interdisciplinary network open to anyone interested in publishing and using language resources, or in open licenses. The OWLG facilitates information ex- change through a mailing list, regular meetings, joint pub- lications, community projects, and interdisciplinary work- shops, including the Linked Data in Linguistics workshop series with recent editions in Reykjavik and Beijing, and the next event in this series …

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