Toward a Global Infrastructure for the Sustainability of Language Resources

Toward a Global Infrastructure for the Sustainability of Language Resources * Gary F. Simons a and Steven Bird b aSIL International and Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX 75236, USA gary_simons@sil.org bDept of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia and Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA sb@csse.unimelb.edu.au Abstract. This paper describes work the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is doing to contribute to a global infrastructure for the sustainability of language resources. After offering a definition of language resource, it addresses the issue of what makes language resources sustainable by defining six necessary and sufficient conditions for their sustained use, then discusses what it takes to make such sustainability a reality by describing the roles of four key sets of players—creators, archives, aggregators, users. With this background, the paper describes the community infrastructure OLAC has developed for allowing its members to express consensus about best practices for digital archiving, plus the technical infrastructure it has developed to provide aggregation and search for the language resources community. The concluding section probes the broader issue of sustainable development to consider the sustainability of language resources in the context of the sustainability of language development and of languages themselves. Keywords: Language documentation, metadata, digital archives, sustainable development 1. Introduction Sustainability has become a byword of our times. In fact, The Global Language Monitor recognized sustainable as the Top Word of 2006.1 Behind all the buzz there is an important concept that has significance even for our language resources community. Focus on the sustainability of the planet in the news media is making us increasingly aware that unless we mend our wasteful ways, we could squander the world’s natural resources along with the opportunity of future generations to enjoy the same quality of life that we do. The language resources community is no stranger to waste. Waste happens when the resources resulting from prior work are no longer available due to the deterioration of the media * This work is supported by the NSF Project OLAC: Accessing the World’s Language Resources, awards 0723357 and 0723864 to the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics. Components of the infrastructure have been developed with our research assistants Haejoong Lee and Debbie Chang and archiving consultant Joan Spanne. We are grateful to members of the OLAC community for their collaboration in developing and implementing OLAC’s standards and recommendations. 1 http://www.languagemonitor.com/top_word_lists Copyright © 2008 by Gary Simons and Steven Bird 87 22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 87–100 that store them or the obsolescence of the formats that encode them. Waste also happens when a new project redoes work that has already been done by someone else, because the new project does not know about the prior work or because the prior work was not made available in a form they could use. Even more pervasive is the waste that happens when ordinary users, who would …

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