The E-MELD Project: Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data
Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry

In late 2000, The LINGUIST List received funding from the NSF to hold a
workshop on digital standards in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of
America's Linguistic Institute in Santa Barbara, California.  The workshop
was designed to prepare the way for E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for
Endangered Languages Data), a 5-year infrastructure project which was also
subsequently funded by NSF.  This presentation will briefly report on the
progress of E-MELD, beginning with the decisions taken by the working
groups at the Santa Barbara Workshop.

The Santa Barbara Workshop was designed to initiate an ongoing
collaboration between three groups of researchers who need each other's
expertise: field linguists and archivists, who are experts in collecting
language data, and language engineers, who are experts in digitizing
linguistic data. It was focused on ways to build a common infrastructure
for the preservation of, and access to, digital linguistic data.  To this
end, three working groups were formed, one on language codes, one on
metadata in linguistic databases, and one on markup.  Each of these working
groups made recommendations on their area.

The language codes group recommended the adoption of a system of Universal
Language Codes, based on the codes now used by Ethnologue but extended to
(a) incorporate a means of precisely coding material from individual
varieties within a language and (b) include a way of encoding linguistic
relationships between languages (including conflicting classifications).
The working group also recommended that a Universal Language Code
Consortium (ULCC) be formed, which would be as international as possible,
and whose task would be the oversight of the system of language codes.  The
metadata group recommended that the OLAC metadata set should be adopted,
with the possible later inclusion of more tags which indicate the
linguistic content of the resource.  The group also recommended that
interoperability between the E-MELD (OLAC) metadata set and that of IMDI be
made a priority.  Finally, the markup group recommended that the EUROTYP
markup be used as a basis for linguistic markup, and that a large-scale
ontology of linguistic markup be designed.  This paper will discuss these
recommendations and their initial implementation in the context of the
E-MELD project.