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The Directory of National *and
Private* Resources Projects World-wide
The members of the ELSNET and ENABLER networks are now in the process of preparing a detailed map of the language and speech resources landscape world-wide. This map will take the form of a website which should contain pointers to all activities in the world that are relevant for those who are interested in language and speech resources (as well as multimodal resources that contain language or speech related components). Our target audience includes both users and developers of resources, as well as people involved in the creation and execution of national or regional resources projects.
We see this site as an information portal for those who want to know what is happening with respect to resources for their own language, but also for those who want to know what is going on in other languages with a view to setting up collaboration links aimed at porting knowledge and experience between languages. As we all know the investments made in language resources are very much determined by economic factors and market prospects. Especially for the languages with limited commercial interest the funding opportunities are very poor, whereas the problems that have to be overcome are the same as for the major languages. Being able to learn from others and to port knowledge from another language to one's own is of crucial importance, and we hope that the resources landscape map will facilitate this.
A first outline of the landscape can be found on http://www.ilc.cnr.it/elsnet4/final-workshop-1session.htm
On this page we try to collect as much information as possible about past, ongoing and future national language resources projects world-wide. Via a very simple web interface people can submit national project data to this site, and update the information if and when necessary. Completing the web form should not take more than a minute or two, and we hope that within the next six weeks we will have collected information on a majority of national resources projects all over the world. We will use a rather loose definition of national project: we intend to cover all projects that are based on (partial or full) public funding and that have as one of their activities the creation of resources that will be made available to a wider audience than just those who are involved in the project.
05-05-2004: As requested by some of you we have now opened
this directory for privately funded resources projects as well,
on the condition that at least one of the following open-ness
criteria is satisfied (all of which may of course be subject to
certain constraints):