OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an initiative to create a unified means of searching online databases of language resources for
linguistic
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
research. The information about resources is stored in
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
format for easy searching. OLAC was founded in 2000, and is hosted at the
Linguistic Data Consortium webserver at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...
.
OLAC advises on best practices in language archiving, and works to promote interoperation between language archives.
Metadata
The OLAC metadata set is based on the complete set of
Dublin Core
140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms
The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...
metadata terms DCMT, but the format allows for the use of extensions to express community-specific qualifiers. It is often contrasted to
IMDI (ISLE Metadata Initiative).
Attributes
The OLAC metadata is based on five primary attributes, ''refine, code, scheme, lang,'' and ''langs'', although the last attribute is only for completed metadata sets.
Each attribute serves a different function and is applicable in a different section of the metadata.
Elements
There are currently 23 different elements that OLAC lists on its metadata page. Elements may be used more than once, and not every element is required in a metadata submission. Each element's entry on the official OLAC page includes the name of the element, its function, notes on its usage, and examples of its coding.
In addition, OLAC provides a list of metadata extensions to augment descriptions.
References
External links
Official website(an
alternative server
Search OLAC
Linguistics organizations
Organizations established in 2000
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