Work Package 6: Community Involvement

Task 6.1: Gathering of Requirements and Use Cases for LT-Web Metadata

One of the primary tasks in Work Package 6 was the gathering of requirements and use cases for LT-Web metadata to feed into the standardization process (see WP2). It featured three primary activities:

• Online communications and survey. We conducted an online survey from March 4 to April 15, 2012. We targeted 75 responses and obtained 36. We found that getting responses was significantly harder than anticipated due to the limited pool of qualified respondents. However, when attendees who provided feedback at the Fifth Multilingual Web workshop are included, the number of early providers of input is in the general range we targeted. One notable outcome of the survey is that it brought three regular participants into the ITS 2.0 working group: Shaun McCance (who is now a co-editor of the specification), Olaf-Michael Stefanov, and Jörg Schütz.
• Detailed interviews. In the process of reviewing the survey and preparing for the Fifth Multilingual Web Workshop, we initiatived an ongoing process to interview representatives from from various organizations about their their needs. As many issues have arisen during the development of the ITS 2.0 specification, these interviews have tended to be targeted to specific needs—e.g., we would interview individuals interested in quality assessment when working on quality-related data categories—rather than general. Much of the feedback we received in this process and at the Workshop is reflected in the ITS 2.0 draft specification. Some of the individuals interviewed in this process, such as Des Oates (Adobe Systems), Sergei Gladkoff (Logrus), Daniel Naber (Language Tool), and Horst Kraemer (init) have gone on to become implementers of various aspects of ITS 2.0
• Requirements Workshop The Fifth Multilingual Web Workshop (11–13 June in Dublin) fulfilled this requirement. It was more focused than previous workshops and targeted implementers. It had 71 attendees from a variety of organizations and featured in-depth discussion about requirements and about the progress made in defining the requirements. The workshop was highly successful and also served to strengthen ties between the ITS 2.0 community and the Linked Open Data (LOD) community through a one-day segment on the connection between the two. For more information see the Workshop page

In addition to these activities, the W3C issued a press release on the MultilingualWeb-LT effort and the W3C Internationalization Activity’s blog has been used to distribute regular announcements about progress, along with various social media channels (see below).

Task 6.2: Wider Community Involvement

The MultilingualWeb-LT project has consistently sought to evangelize its activities to potential users and beneficiaries. Specific deliverables include:

• Disseminate draft specifications and gather feedback through industry bodies and standards organizations. Led by DFKI, the project has maintained active publicity arrangements with bodies such as GALA and TAUS, which have disseminated project messages and helped publicize the ITS 2.0 drafts. In addition, regular participation in industry conferences has led to substantial in-depth interaction with interested parties and greater awareness of project activities. (See below for a list of presentations made by project participants on ITS 2.0/MultilingualWeb-LT.)
• DFKI will organize webinars and present LT-Web and the metadata definitions in partnership other industry bodies, as well as to demonstrate prototypes and solicit documented feedback.. This deliverable is ongoing. With the release of the ITS 2.0 final call, we will be reaching out for more feedback and to promote implementation of the specification.
• In-depth interviews. As noted in the previous section, we are involved in in ongoing discussions with representatives of various types of organizations about the ITS 2.0 specification. Rather than a one-time set of formal interviews, this activity has become an ongoing consultation aimed at understanding requirements and how they relate to our activities and the developing ITS 2.0 specification.
• Conference presentations. Led by DFKI, the consortium has maintained a strong and consistent presence at industry conferences. See below for details.
• Demonstrations of prototypes in booth at industry conferences. This deliverable is not yet complete as it depends on completion of other deliverables (such as the move to final call for ITS 2.0) prior to demonstrations. These exhibition opportunities will become much more prominent in Year 2 of the project.
• The LT-Web W3C working group will issue requests for comments about drafts of the LT-Web metadata standard, and will handle the comments received from the public on the drafts. This task is largely handled in Work Package 2. However, most of the comments have been driven through the MultilingualWeb-LT public mailing list, which has received over 2100 comments between March and the end of November, 2013. While many of these comments have come from project participants, a significant number have come from outside the project and the detailed nature of some of the discussion has led to some outside individuals (e.g., Shaun McCance, Jörg Schütz, Olaf-Michael Stefanov) joining the project and taking on active roles within it. We anticipate that substantial numbers of additional comments will come during the Last Call period (December 2012 and January 2013).

As of December 10, 2012, we have presented two webinars—one to GALA, one on the test suite, with another webinar planned for Q1, 2013—(out of three planned), 0 booths (out of four planned), over a dozen even presentations (out of two planned), and over 20 in-depth interviews (out of 12 planned)

Task 6.3. LT-Web Metadata Outreach

Planning for this task will commence in Q1 2013, with selection of a venue and development of the promotion plan. This task will result in the Seventh MultilingualWeb Workshop, which will be a general event with a heavy LT-Web component.

Additional Activities

Evangelization

Aside from the formal tasks identified above in the LT-Web plan, we have been active in evangelizing the LT-Web project through the following mechanisms:

• MultilingualWeb Facebook page. This page provides a means to reach out to approximately 300 individuals. We will utilize the Facebook page on an ongoing basis to promote the MultilingualWeb Workshop series.
• W3C Internationalization Activity Blog. This blog is one of our primary channels for information distribution and has wide readership. In addition, content posted to the Blog is automatically syndicated to Twitter.
• MultilingualWeb Twitter Channel. This Twitter feed has over 450 followers and is used primarily to send announcements about project progress and events.
• LinkedIn MultilingualWeb page. This page currently has over 520 members and features discussion on standards and activities related to multilinguality on the Web. We use it to make announcements about MultilingualWeb events.

• ISO TC37 Meetings (June 27, 2012, Madrid). The LT-Web project sponsored a reception for TC37 attendees. Pedro Diez and Arle Lommel presented a brief overview of the project along with a call for participation at the start of this reception.
• Multilingual Linked Open Data for Enterprises (MLODE) (September 24–25, 2012, Leipzig). In order to further establish links between the Linked Open Data (LOD) and ITS communities, the project sponsored MLODE. Information about the project was included in the program booklet for all attendees and flyers were distributed with information on the upcoming MultilingualWeb Workshop in Rome.
• FEISGILTT 2012 (October 16–17, 2012)

Coordination with Other Projects

The LT-Web project has maintained ongoing coordination with other projects and standardization activities, including the following:

• XLIFF. An ongoing formal relationship with XLIFF is considered essential to the success of ITS 2.0. A number of participants in LT-Web are also active participants in the XLIFF Technical Committee and Bryan Schnabel (XLIFF Committee Chair) spoke at the Fifth MultilingualWeb Workshop. In addition, both committees collaborated on the FEISGILTT program, which helped promote both groups’ work to each other.
• ISO TC37. A number of LT-Web participants are also active in TC37. In addition to sponsoring the TC37 meetings in Madrid, participants in our project also contribute actively to various TC37 activities and help ensure that ITS 2.0 development is consistent with ISO standards.
• Linport. The Linport project addresses “package” formats for localizable content. While the functional overlap with ITS is minimal, join participants in both groups have worked to ensure tat technical solutions are broadly compatible.
• QT Launchpad. Another EU-funded project, QT Launchpad focuses on establishing frameworks to promote quality translation. The localization quality data categories in ITS 2.0 draw heavily upon early results from this project and QT Launchpad will use ITS 2.0 quality markup for its efforts.