NLSR "Actual status of the ACL Natural Software Registry" Report for 2002
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During the last year the ACL Natural Language Registry (NLSR) team has been looking for extending the domain of application of the NLSR and for closer cooperation and interlinking with organizations and initiatives concerned with the listing and organization of NLP/CL resources.

In this context there have been among other discussions with ELRA, Inria (University Nancy) and the ISLE Metadata initiative (IMDI). Those discussions have resulted in the building of an European Consortium, which submitted a project proposal to the European Commission. A main topic of this (in the meantime accepted) project concerns the interoperability of language data and NLP tools repositories and the description of a web protocol supporting this interoperability. The protocol has been named "LREP" (Language Repository Exchange Protocol), and has been presented at the LREC 2002 conference. The ACL Registry will be modified in order to be able to access via this protocol the relevant language data repositories and to be accessed by queries coming from other repositories.

The NLSR has been invited by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) initiative to participate as a data provider. For this, the NLSR made its data comform to an OAI provider. Furthermore, an XML output been developed that is constantly available on the web, so that it can be harvested by the OLAC tools. There are still some few improvements to be implemented in order to make the ACL Registry fully compliant to the OLAC format.

The NLSR is participating as a data provider in the German Project "COLLATE" (Computational Linguistic and Language Technology), hosted in Saarbruecken at both DFKI and the University of the Saarland, and is now fully operational in the Virtual Information Center of this project (www.lt-world.org). All the data of the ACL Registry are listed in the "Systems and Products" part ot LT-World.

Thierry Declerck
Contact: registry@dfki.de