The GOLD Community of Practice: an infrastructure for linguistic data on the Web

The GOLD Community of Practice is proposed as a model for linking on-line linguistic data to an ontology. The key components of the model include the linguistic data resources themselves and those focused on the knowledge derived from data. Data resources include the ever-increasing amount of linguistic field data and other descriptive language resources being migrated to the Web. The knowledge resources capture generalizations about the data and are anchored in the General Ontology for Linguistic Description (GOLD). It is argued that such a model is in the spirit of the vision for a Semantic Web and, thus, provides a concrete methodology for rendering highly divergent resources semantically interoperable. The focus of this work, then, is not on annotation at the syntactic level, but rather on how annotated Web resources can be linked to an ontology. Furthermore, a methodology is given for creating specific communities of practice within the overall Web infrastructure for linguistics. Finally, ontology-driven search is discussed as a key application of the proposed model.