Expressing Language Resource Metadata as Linked Data: The Case of the Open Language Archives Community

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a world-wide virtual library of language resources. The library is virtual because OLAC does not hold any of the resources itself; rather it aggregates a union catalog of all the resources held by the participating institutions. A major achievement of the community has been to develop standards for expressing and exchanging the metadata records that describe the holdings of an archive. The OLAC metadata standard prescribes an interchange format that uses a community-specific XML markup schema that was adopted in 2003. In the meantime, Linked Data has emerged as a common data representation that allows information from disparate communities to be linked into an interoperating universal Web of Data. This paper explores the application of Linked Data to the problem of describing language resources in the context of OLAC, describing work that has already been done to link the OLAC union catalog into the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud as well as the potential of embracing Linked Data as the basis for a revised OLAC metadata standard.