The GOLD Community has a vision to bring together those interested in the best-practice encoding of linguistic data. The aims of the GOLD Community may be summarized as follows:
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The GOLD Community of Practice has as its basis the General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD). First introduced by Farrar and Langendoen (2003), GOLD was originally envisioned as a solution to the problem of resolving disparate markup schemes for linguistic data, in particular data fom endangered languages. GOLD is now much more general and can be applied to all languages. GOLD was first envisioned by Scott Farrar and is reported in his 2003 dissertation.
Will Lewis created the first version of the ontology by transforming and organizing information obtained from SIL International's on-line glossary of linguistic terms. A team of research assistants at the University of Arizona then combed the linguistics literature to double the size of the term set. Much of GOLD's intellectual content can be attributed to Terry Langendoen who also coined the acronym. Major development has been done by Gary Simons, Anthony Aristar, Brian Fitzsimons, and many others involved with the E-MELD project. Most recently in 2005, E-MELD sponsored a workshop to allow critique of the content and structure of GOLD. The implementers are now revising GOLD based on the suggestions from the E-MELD 2005 workshop participants. In this they are being aided by consultation with The Surrey Morphology Group, which is participating in a series of exchange visits designed to improve the content coverage of GOLD.
The idea of a GOLD Community came together in November 2004 during the Fresno meeting, organized by Will Lewis in order to promote the GOLD effort to the larger community. The notion of community-based ontology building was also discussed at the Digital Tools Summit in Linguistics held in Lansing, Michigan in conjunction with the E-MELD 2006 workshop. One outgrowth of this discussion is the new Ontology Wiki, designed to promote community participation in the extension and revision of GOLD.
GOLD owes its initial support to the NSF-sponsored E-MELD grant. Though not originally part of the project's aims, it soon became evident to the E-MELD PI's that achieving standardized markup was unattainable primarily due to the diversity of the endangered languages community. Then, in a separate effort, the Data-Driven Linguistic Ontology (DDLO) grant was awarded by the NSF in 2004 to build out GOLD. And in April, 2006, a supplement to E-MELD was awarded by NSF. The supplement funded the exchange visits with the Surrey Morphology Group.