OLAC News from 2001

SIL Ethnologue joins OLAC [12/01]

The Ethnologue is a database of linguistic, demographic and geographical information for over 7,000 living and recently extinct languages. Gary Simons has created an OLAC interface for the Ethnologue, permitting the database to be accessed via the OLAC cross-archive search engine. Enter any language name in the search field in the banner of this page, and view hits from the Ethnologue amongst the results.

OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting [12/01]

The OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is the standard that defines how OLAC service providers harvest metadata from OLAC data providers. A draft has been posted for comment.

OLAC Search Engine [12/01]

OLAC has developed an experimental cross-archive search engine. It now harvests 18,000 records from 13 OLAC archives: LDC, ELRA, DFKI, TDProject, Perseus, ANLC, APS, LACITO, CBOLD, AISRI, TRACTOR, OTA and Ethnologue. The search engine may be accessed via the banner on this page. Users may query it by entering language names and/or linguistic resource types. A fielded search function is also available.

Because OLAC archives are also members of the Open Archives Initiative, queries on OAI service providers return hits from OLAC archives. Users can test this out by visiting the ARC cross-archive searching service and entering the query term "lexicon". OLAC is developing a new cross-archive searching service based on ARC.

Another feature that OLAC archives inherit from the OAI is a gateway for web crawlers, permitting OLAC records to be discovered using conventional search engines.

OLAC presented in Japan [11/01]. OLAC was presented by Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in a workshop at the 6th Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium (Tokyo, November 2001).

OLAC announced in D-Lib Magazine [10/01]. A short piece on OLAC appeared in the October issue of D-Lib magazine.

OLAC Metadata Set released for comment [10/01]. The OLAC Metadata Set defines a series of qualifications to the Dublin Core Element Set, tailored to language resources. A new version of the metadata set draft has been posted (2001-10-22), along with an updated version of the XML schema (version 0.4). Feedback is welcomed.

NSF Funds Digital Archive for Endangered Languages [7/01]. Anthony Aristar at Wayne State University and colleagues at Eastern Michigan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Arizona, have been awarded a $2 million NSF grant to develop a public digital archive of endangered language data. The archive will employ OLAC metadata.

OLAC Process document released for comment [5/01]. This document summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC and describes how OLAC is organized and how it operates. Comments are invited from the community.