The aim of the workshop was to establish an infrastructure for electronic publishing that simultaneously addresses the needs of users (including scholars, language communities, and the general public), creators, archivists, software developers, and funding agencies. Such an infrastructure would ideally meet a number of requirements important to these different stakeholders, such as:

• provide a single entry point on the internet through which all materials can be easily located, regardless of where they are stored (on the internet or in a traditional archive). Essentially, this would be a massive union catalog of the whole internet and beyond.
• identify every language uniquely and precisely, so that all materials relevant to a particular language can be located
• make available software for creating, using, and archiving data (especially data in special formats); this includes software to help convert data from older formats to newer ones
• serve as a forum for giving and receiving advice about software, archiving practices, and related matters
• provide opportunity for comments and reviews of materials published within the system

The workshop was organized by Steven Bird (University of Pennsylvania) and Gary Simons (SIL International).¹ It included approximately 40 presentations and several working sessions on a variety of topics.

There was general agreement among the participants that a system for organizing the wealth of language-related material on the internet is needed, and that an appropriate way to establish one is by following the guidelines of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [http://www.openarchives.org]. (These guidelines provide a general framework for creating systems like this for specific scholarly communities.) An OAI publishing and archiving system contains the following elements:

• data providers, which house the materials that are indexed in the system
• a standardized set of cataloguing information for describing each of the materials, also known as "metadata" (i.e., data about data)
• service providers, which collect the metadata from all the data providers and allow users to search it in various ways so as to locate materials of interest to them

In the case of linguistics, the system will be known as the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). The Linguist list [http://www.linguistlist.org] has agreed to serve the system as its primary service provider. It will be the main source that people will use to find materials through the system. Further information about OLAC can be found at [http://www.language-archives.org]. The agreement to establish OLAC is probably the most important accomplishment of the workshop.

This agreement was solidified through working sessions which met during the workshop and started the process of working through the details in various areas, such as:

• Character encoding: Unicode, fonts, character sets, etc.
• Data structure for different types of data (lexicons, annotated text, etc.)
• Metadata (cataloguing information that should be common to the whole community and how it should be represented in the computer) and other concerns of archivists
• Ethics, especially the responsibilities that archivists and publishers have to language communities
• Expectations of users, creators (e.g. authors), software developers

These and other issues will continue to be discussed on email lists in the coming months, ultimately culminating in recommendations for "best practice" in each area, together with a preliminary launch of the whole system, hopefully within a year. (Prototypes of the system are available now at the OLAC address above, along with various planning documents.)

There were also a number of conference papers, which provided a foundation for making the working sessions productive. Rather than list or review all the presentations here, I will summarize them, since they are all available on the conference website [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/exploration/expl2000]. The topics covered included the following:

• Proposals for various aspects of the OLAC system
• Concerns of various stakeholders, such as archivists, sponsors, language communities
• Descriptions and demonstrations of specific software, research projects, and web publishing systems
• Metadata and metadata standards
• Technical issues, such as Unicode, the OAI, sorting, data formats for different types of language materials (e.g. dictionaries, annotated text, example sentences in linguistic papers, and audio)

One insight that I gleaned from these presentations was a better understanding of glossed interlinear text. Interlinear text is not a type of data, but rather just one possible way of displaying an annotated text. The annotations on a text can consist of many types of information: alternate transcriptions, morpheme glosses, word glosses, free translations, syntactic structure (and possibly several alternative tree structures for the same text), discourse structure, audio and video recordings, footnotes and commentary on various issues, etc. What ties them all together is a "timeline" that proceeds from the beginning to the end of a text, to which different types of information are anchored. Aligned interlinear glosses are one way of displaying some of this information, but not the only way, and not even the most appropriate way for some types of information. The traditional arrangement of Talmudic material, for example, with the core text in the center of the page and commentary around the edges, is another possible display of annotated text, in which the annotations are associated more with whole sentences and paragraphs than with individual morphemes. There are also some sophisticated examples available for presenting audio alongside interlinear text. (For example, check out the LACITO archive [http://lacito.archivage.vjf.cnrs.fr]!)

Throughout, it was very clear that those at the conference had a great deal in common with each other:

• a primary concern for descriptive (as distinguished from theoretical) linguistics
• a desire to make language materials available, to communities of speakers and the general public as well as scholars
• an interest in taking advantage of the Internet, which provides a means of publishing such materials that by-passes the limitations of traditional publication (since the costs are so much lower, and thus appropriate for materials that have smaller audiences)
• awareness that many materials may be less than fully-polished yet still valuable to some people and worth archiving
• a sense of frustration with the currently confused state of the art in data formats, especially fonts and character encoding, and the lack of good information about how best to archive and publish on the web
• awareness of the large amount of data that is in data formats which will be obsolete in a few years (and thus a willingness to accept data in whatever form it is in, while also seeing a need for software to help convert data to newer formats)
• a strong suspicion toward and distrust of rigid requirements, yet a willingness to adopt standards voluntarily when their usefulness has been demonstrated

Finally, the conference pointed out several trends that will be increasingly important in future years.

• The speakers of lesser-known languages will be more actively involved in the production and use of materials in and about their languages, and their concerns will increasingly have to be considered by scholars. These include carefully documenting permissions and levels of access to materials, making sure that language materials are available to the communities themselves, and being careful that scholars do not inadvertently aid commercial interests in exploiting native knowledge-systems (such as medicinal use of plants) without appropriate compensation.
• The boundary between publishing, libraries, and archiving is being blurred by the shift to the digital world. Materials can be "archived" on the web, which is a type of publication. Electronic "libraries" are springing up in many places. Published and unpublished works from around the world can be listed together in one common catalog. The same technology is important in both spheres of activity. In short, these activities are merging under a new umbrella that could be called "scholarly information management". A corollary to this trend is that archiving is not just something done at the end of a research project; it's part of the ongoing process of managing the information that the project produces.
• In such a world, and with huge numbers of resources available to sift through, metadata becomes increasingly important. A freeform paragraph description in a publications catalog is no longer good enough. It is the metadata that users will consult in order to find materials of interest to them, so the metadata must be carefully structured, accurate and current. More and more, scholars will have to think not just about producing materials but also about how to describe them so as to make them accessible to others.
• Unicode [http://www.unicode.org] is the way of the future for representation of special characters in computers. The days of special fonts for each language project are numbered. Instead, Unicode will make possible a single set of fonts that meets virtually everyone's needs in the same package. Over the next few years, most people will be switching their computers over to using Unicode almost exclusively (that is, if they want to take advantage of newer software).
• Language data will increasingly need to be structured carefully so that not only can people view it and use it, but machines will be able to understand and manipulate it in various ways. This will most likely be done using XML (Extensible Markup Language) which is already widely-supported in the computer industry, with more support becoming available regularly.²

All in all, it was a workshop that was both stimulating and practical, one which will have an unusual amount of influence in months and years to come.

Footnotes:

¹ Funding was provided by the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) of the University of Pennsylvania, the International Standards in Language Engineering Spoken Language Group (ISLE), and Talkbank.

² Since XML's development has been closely-associated with the World Wide Web consortium [http://www.w3.org/XML/], it has been widely regarded as the successor to HTML for web pages. However, this is just a small part of its usefulness; it is a general-purpose system for representing the structure of information in a document or database, which can be customized for myriads of purposes. Many software tools are currently available for creating and manipulating data in XML, with more being created all the time. One, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations [http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt], can do complex restructuring of XML data.

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