Linked Data for Language Technology Roadmapping Workshop, 21st March 2014 Athens, Greece

Apologies for cross-posting.

- Felix

TheLinked Data for Language Technology community 
<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt/>is organising a*roadmapping workshop 
<https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt/wiki/LD4LT_Group_Kick-Off_and_Roadmap_Meeting>* on 
21st March in Athens, to build a better understanding of the potential 
synergies and co-evolution paths for /language technologies,/such as 
machine translation, information extraction and sentiment analysis, and 
/linked data/. Language technologies are key to extracting information 
from unstructured content in different languages to form linked data, 
while linked data can aid the discovery and sharing of the language 
resources that underpin language technologies.

*Who should attend?*Any organisation interested in automated extraction 
of data from unstructured digital content, especially content in more 
than one language and including multimedia as well as textual content. 
Organisations engaged in the market for language technologies applied 
beyond English-language content and data. All these can benefit from 
more open access to linked language resources.

*How can you participate?*You can register for the eventhere 
<https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/lider-rmws-20140321/>. If you wish to 
present a similar statement you can indicate this on your registration 
form. The event will then proceed in an structured open format to 
identify and capture from participants their use case priorities and 
interoperability, best-practice and technology gaps they face. Anonline 
survey <https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/ld4lt-wbs1/>is currently open 
for gathering industry view on use case prioritation. You can also 
contribute directly by joining theLinked Data for Language Technology 
community <http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt/>at the w3C

*Programme and Topics: *The workshop will open with keynotes from Hans 
Uszkoreit who is Scientific Director DFKI, Nicoletta Calzolari Director 
of Research CNR, Phil Archer who is leading the W3C Data Activity and 
Asun Gomez-Perez UPM who is leading the LIDER coordination action on 
linguistic linked data. This will be followed by short briefing from 
four existing international communities working in this area, by 
position statements from companies about existing use cases and by an 
open workshop session to establish use case priorities.

The language resource community has already made a concerted attempt to 
catalogue different data sets through theMETA-SHARE initiative 
<http://www.meta-share.eu/>. It has tackled the need for common 
meta-data for linguistic corpora of various types and has paid 
particular attention to encoding the different usage rights that exist 
across governmental, academic and commercial data sources. This 
initiative is therefore well primed to exploit linked data technologies 
being standardised by theW3C Data Activity 
<http://www.w3.org/2013/data/>to further open the cataloguing and 
discovery of language resources.

This is particularly timely as the European Commission has launched it 
new H2020 funding programme with a strong support available for 
innovation and research in theopen data and language technology space 
<http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/information-and-networking-days-h2020-work-programme-2014-2015-connecting-europe-facility>. 
In April 2014  it will also launch its Connecting Europe Facilities 
programme, with €1Billion for funding new pan-European digital services, 
including open data exchange and automated translations services. In 
both these initiatives, strong, open solutions for the interoperability 
of language resources as open web data will be key.

The workshop we take a use case driven approach to key questions around 
the synergies possible between the W3C's open web data standards and 
existing approaches to sharing language resources and applying them for 
training language technologies:

  *

    How can language resource sharing infrastructure, such as
    META-SHARE, migrate to a linked data approach so as to benefit from
    more robust, decentralised and scalable publication and search features?

  *

    How well can existing linked data vocabularies such asCreative
    Commons Rights Expression Language
    <http://creativecommons.org/ns>andLinked Data Right
    <http://oeg-dev.dia.fi.upm.es/licensius/static/ldr/>support the
    usage rights models established for language resources?

  *

    How far can language resource meta-data be supported by theData
    Catalogue Vocabulary
    <http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-dcat-20140116/>or theVocabulary
    of Interlinked Datasets <http://vocab.deri.ie/void>?

  *

    How can emerging onto-lexical resources such asBabelNet
    <http://babelnet.org/>be usefully interlinked with individual terms
    in existing language resources?

  *

    How can the process of locating and managing language resources to
    train language technologies be eased and optimised by vocabularies
    such as theProvenance Ontology <http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/>or
    theProvenance and Plans Ontology
    <http://vocab.linkeddata.es/p-plan/>for repeatable data workflows.

However these are just a sample of the many issues and viewpoints that 
will have a bearing on the future of Linked Data for Language 
Technoloiges, and we hope you will be able to join us in Athen to share 
yours.