July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
E-MELD“School” of Best Practice
Helen Aristar-Dry & Gayathri Sriram
The LINGUIST List
Eastern Michigan University
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
The LINGUIST List Crew
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Overview
•The E-MELD ‘School’ of BestPractice: latest version
–Purpose
•What is ‘best practice’?
•Why ‘best practice’?
–Organization
•Demo some of the facilities
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
A note about the name…
•Showroom of BP? …..Nope, it’s got rooms.
•House of BP?
•Funhouse?
•Playhouse?
•Outhouse?
•Bazaar?
•Palace?
•Chateau?
•Shed?
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
What is Best Practice?
Practices designed to insure that digitallanguage resources :
•endure through time.
•can be reused by others, both now and in thefuture.
•are as independent as possible of computerenvironments, scholarly communities, anddomains of application.
-Bird & Simons 2003
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Best Practice as we know it …
•Distinguish between the archival format andthe presentation format(s). BP is concernedprimarily with archival format.
•Archival formats should employ open fileformats and open standards.
•Examples of archive formats:
–Documents: plain text with XML markup.
–Images: TIF 16 bit gray scale format
–Audio files: pure (uncompressed) WAV files.
. . . this afternoon
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Best Practice
•Write metadata for the language resource inan approved format.Recommended:
•OLAC format
•A format mapped to OLAC, e.g., IMDI
•Make the metadata available to a generalsearch engine.
Recommended:
•An OLAC service provider, e.g. LINGUIST List
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Best Practice
•For morphosyntactic markup:countenance different terminology setsbut use an ontology of linguisticconcepts (GOLD) as an interlanguage
•Relate the different morphologicalmarkup schemas to the ontology bymeans of a metaschema.
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Why Best Practice?
“Best practice is enduring practice”(Simons, bc)
BP is important for all languagedocumentation . . .
. . . but especially for documentationof endangered languages
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Why Best Practice?
•According to the Ethnologue, 52languages have only 1 speakerleft.
•Somewhere 52 field linguists aremaking audiotapes, videotapes,and transcripts….
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
What if . . .
–Ten are transcribing in MSWord 6
(which probably won’t bereadable in 15 years )
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
What if . . .
–Ten more are usingcompressed audio formats?
(and compressing away someof the data)
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
What if . . .
–Two more forget to turnon the tape recorder?
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
A true story….
The BBC Doomsday Project…
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
So the School is designed to
•Help users preserve their valuable data forgenerations to come.
–Data:
•Notes
•Images
•Audio & video
–Users:
•linguists, programmers, archivists
•(digital) beginners or advanced users
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Ob jectives:
•Teach
•Motivate
•Facilitate
•Invite (suggestions &participation)
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
What will the School offer?
–Information about the preservation anddigitization of data
–Tutorials to provide hands-on training
–Facilities for online operations on thelinguist’s own data, i.e., creation of metadata
–Tools (and links to tools) for client-sideoperations, i.e., text annotation
–Reading material about various aspects ofBP
–showcase of data from 10 endangeredlanguages digitized according to BP
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
How is the School organized?
–Information
–Tutorials
–Online facilities
–Client-sideTools
–Reading material
–Showcase of data
from 10 endangered
languages
Classroom
Workroom
Tool Room
Reading Room
Exhibit Hall
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
The Exhibit Hall
Purpose: to show what can be done within theBP framework
•Data (currently) from Biao Min and Mocovi
•Info on the language(s)
•Biao Min lexicon & metadata
–Archive formats
–Presentation formats (with some audio)
•Search: cross-language search at a fine-grained morphosyntactic level (thanks to theontology)
•Comments facility for users
•What else?
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Classroom
Teach users how to:
–choose equipment & software
–create metadata and make it available forsearch
–create an XML file, schema & metaschema
–create and use stylesheets to transform XMLfiles
–annotate & transcribe audio & video files
–acquire ethics
–What else??
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Workroom
Where user gets to work on her own data, usingBP tools for:
•metadata creation (ORE)
•terminology mapping
•annotation & transcription
•lexicon creation (FIELD)
•What else?
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Reading Room
–Reference materials
–Manuals
–Links to off-site tutorials
–White papers
–Glossary of terms (linked toother pages on the site)
•What else?
July 11, 2003
E-MELD 2003
Toolroom
Downloads of :
•FIELD (Laptop version)
•Standalone ORE
•Links to LDC, IMDI tools, etc. for
–Conversion
– Annotation
•What else?