Knowledge Exchange and Terminology Interchange: The role of standards

Abstract The emergence of standards for storing and retrieving language resources, including terminology and lexicographical data, documents and text corpora, will benefit system developers and users of a range of language and knowledge engineering systems. The developers will be able to cope better with the vagaries of natural language since standardised entries in term databases, or structured documents in a text corpus, reduce the variations encountered in any language resource. The users will benefit because they will be able to take advantage of data produced from a greater number of data producers since standardisation filters out minor and arbitrary variations in which the data is stored which can confound many a current language engineering system. We are concerned with standards that specify markup for terms, words, and documents, and how data can be marked-up and decoded automatically. Much of the discussion is based on the results of the recently completed EU-sponsored project Standards-based Access to Lexicographical and Terminological multilingual resources (SALT - IST-1999-10951), and the recent deliberations within the International Organization for Standardization's Technical Committee 37 (TC37) on standards for terminology and other language resources, specifically ISO 12620 and ISO 16642.