Gold as a standard for linguistic data interoperation: a road map for development
Gary Simons, Baden Hughes · Minerva Access (University of Melbourne) · 2006
GOLD, the General Ontology for Linguistic Description [1], has somewhat unexpectedly emerged from the EMELD project. Originally conceived of as a morphosyntactic annotation inventory and label mapping scheme, GOLD has now been formalized as an ontology by which disparate data sets can be integrated through a common representation of the basic linguistic features.The overall vision of the GOLD Community is that:"By agreeing on a shared ONTOLOGY of linguistic concepts and on a shared infrastructure for INTEROPERATION, the linguistics community will be able to produce RESOURCES that describe individual languages in a comparable way, to develop TOOLS that produce these comparable resources, and to query SERVICES that aggregate as many comparable resources as are available." [2]In the EMELD context, a significant amount of effort has been invested in the development of GOLD in the first dimension of this vision, namely a shared collection of linguistic concepts. Initial surveying work been completed to glean linguistic concepts and their definitions from published materials. This survey work has been complemented by web data mining activities [3] to further increase the coverage of GOLD. GOLD has been instantiated in several formal versions, and a range of proof of concept implementations have featured at previous EMELD events [4, 5, 6] and other venues [7].However the latter four items from the GOLD Community vision (to achieve interoperation through resources, tools, and services) remain largely unaddressed, and thus there remains considerable effort to be expended in achieving the vision in its entirity. Upon reflection, we believe that there are presently three significant barriers to the widespread adoption of GOLD and subsequent realization of the interoperation goals, vis: * the complexity of the dissemination format which in effect places the threshold for engagement with GOLD at too high a level; * the absence of a well defined change process