Language resources are needed by many people and tools:
- language teachers use computers to store example sentences, present grammars patterns, help learners to find mistakes etc.
- machine translation tools use word classes, grammar and other information, or large sets of data in various language, to implement their translation methods
- spell checkers use word information, grammars etc.
- terminology tools rely on lexicons and terminology data bases to check e.g. for consistency in translation
- linguists need collections of data to evaluate their theories about language
- and so on …
Developing language resources is a time consuming and expensive task. Hence, creating and reusing the resources has become a major effort. The LREC conference series on language resources is attended by many experts who have embraced W3C technologies like XML or RDF, to ease the reuse of resources.
This year, some members of the W3C staff have prepared a paper and a presentation for an LREC workshop about what is new in XML technologies, and how that benefits language resources. That effort was good for both sides: For the language resources experts it gave the opportunity to discuss the latest developments. For the W3C staff it provided a great chance to get feedback from an important user community.