A: The GOLD Community is a group of linguists interested in promoting consensus through the sharing of common resources and tools. The primary aim of the GOLD Community is to promote and utilize best-practice methodology in the markup of linguistic data resources.
Q: How can I get involved?...more here when the formal statements are written...
Q: What is an ontology?An ontology is a set of statements in a formal language (e.g., first-order logic) that describes/conceptualizes the knowledge in a given domain. An ontology declares what kinds of entities exist in that domain along with what kinds of relationships hold among them. Ontologies usually assume a particular level of granularity and a particular level of formal detail.
Q: Why use ontologies?The main reason to use ontologies is that they can render disparate markup terminologies transparent, by placing the focus on the meaning of the markup instead of merely its form.
Q: What is meant by the term 'best practice'?'Best practice' refers to using the most advanced technology available for a given task, such as linguistic annotation. One recommendation for best-practice is given, for example, by the E-MELD School of Best Practice. General best-practice recommendations for the Web are promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Q: What is the Semantic Web?The Semantic Web is an Internet initiative that promotes content interoperability via cutting-edge protocols, markup languages, and standards. More info on the Semantic Web initiative can be found at the Semantic Web Community site or on the W3C site.
Q: How does the GOLD Community relate to the Semantic Web?The GOLD Community can be viewed as a linguistics-specific extension of the Semantic Web, since the GOLD Community uses some of the same tools and recommendations. We believe that the success of the Semantic Web rests in the hands of specific sub-fields, e.g., descriptive linguistics.
Q: What is E-MELD?E-MELD stands for 'Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data' and is a 5-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It's aims are to recommend best-practice for: Metadata, Markup, Language Identification, and Linguistic Ontology. For more info, see E-MELD's main site.