Design and collection of ontological metadata for enhancing interoperability of language resources

This paper describes the design and implementation of a large scale ontological database named SHACHI, storing detailed metadata on language resources (LRs) in Asian and Western countries. SHACHI has been constructed to enhance the interoperability of LRs, that is, to effectively combine LRs, to systematically store LR metadata, to provide a common infrastructure for web services, to investigate languages, tag sets, and formats compiled in LRs, and to ultimately utilise all these factors for more efficient development of LRs. This ontological metadata database, containing more than 2,000 compiled LRs such as corpora, dictionaries, thesauruses and lexicons, has an aspect of an archive of a large scale metadata of LRs, and its website is now open to the public and accessible to all internet users. SHACHI metadata set is an extended version of OLAC metadata set which conforms to Dublin Core metadata element set. This paper first presents the methodologies to systematically store LR metadata and efficiently LR catalogues, and then explains the structure of the ontological metadata database, as well as the realisation of the LR catalogue search tool. The usefulness of the ontology search function has been investigated.