Interoperability of Corpora and Annotations

This paper describes the application of OWL and RDF to address the interoperability of linguistic corpora and linguistic annotations within such corpora. Interoperability of linguistic corpora involves two aspects: Structural interoperability (annotations of different origin are represented using the same formalism) and conceptual interoperability (annotations of different origin are linked to a common vocabulary).

Building on an existing infrastructure developed to represent, to store, to query and to visualize multi-layer corpora with any kind of text-oriented annotation, this paper proposes to address both aspects by means of OWL/RDF-based formalisms. Key advantages of this approach include the existence of a rich technological ecosystem developed around RDF and OWL, the conceptual similarity of generic data models for linguistic annotations and RDF (both based on labeled directed graphs), and the application of OWL/DL reasoners that can be applied to validate the consistency of linguistic corpora and their annotations and to infer additional information that is relevant, for example, for their appropriate visualization.

Additionally, representing corpora in OWL and RDF allows to interlink resources freely, e.g., different annotation layers of a multi-layer corpus, translated texts in parallel corpora, or linguistic corpora and lexical-semantic resources. Modeled in this way, corpora can be fully integrated in a Linked Open Data (sub-)cloud of linguistic resources, along with lexical-semantic resources and knowledge bases of information about languages and linguistic terminology.