Industry Survey Launch

Organisations world-wide are struggling to better use the WWW to engage in meaningful online conversations with customers and citizens. To do this in a scalable and cost effective way, many are turning to automated language technologies. These can assist in: discovering/extracting information; understanding opinions/trends; processing and managing multilingual/multimedia content and data; and monitoring/forcasting topics of interest.

However, if you are already considering or using language technologies you will understand the key role played by data in training automated language technologies to meet the needs of your specific application. Locating, collecting and determining the quality and relevance of such linguistic data therefore forms a major cost, and a barrier, for the successful use of language technologies.

Open linked data on the web, using standards developed by the W3C, may offer an ideal solution to discover and exchange linguistic data across a wide range of commercial and governmental applications. However, establishing international best-practice and developing open technical specifications requires a much better understanding of these different applications and their requirements.

To this end, a new W3C community group has been formed to assemble and discuss use cases and data handling requirements for language technology applications. We invite you now to join the Linked Data for Language Technology (LD4LT) group and engage in these activities. You can provide an indication of your particular interests and requirements via the initial survey at https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/ld4lt-wbs1/

We also invite you to participate in any of the upcoming road-mapping workshops being organised by the group at the following events:

• LD4LT Group kick-off 21 March in Athens, Greece, co-located with the European Data Forum 2014
• 7-8 May in Madrid, Spain, as part of the 7th W3C Multilingual Web Workshop
• 3 June in Dublin, Ireland, co-located with the LocWorld conference

The results of these consultations will be published for discussion via the LD4LT group. They will provide a roadmap for other interoperability, research and platform development activities spanning the language technology and linked data domains. These activities will include the W3C OntoLex and Best Practice in Multilingual Linked Open Data community groups as well as future EU-funded collaborations under the H2020 programme.