Construction of a Metadata Database for Efficient Development and Use of Language Resources
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)
Abstract
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Nagoya University have been jointly constructing a large scale database named SHACHI by collecting detailed meta-information on language resources (LRs) in Asia and Western countries, for the purpose of effectively combining LRs. The purpose of this project is to investigate languages, tag sets, and formats compiled in LRs throughout the world, to systematically store LR metadata, to create a search function for this information, and to ultimately utilize all this for a more efficient development of LRs. This metadata database contains more than 2,000 compiled LRs such as corpora, dictionaries, thesauruses and lexicons, forming a large scale metadata of LRs archive. Its metadata, an extended version of OLAC metadata set conforming to Dublin Core, which contain detailed meta-information, have been collected semi-automatically. This paper explains the design and the structure of the metadata database, as well as the realization of the catalogue search tool. Additionally, the website of this database is now open to the public and accessible to all Internet users.