Sustainability of Linguistic Resources

This paper describes a new research initiative addressing the issue of sustainability of linguistic resources. This initiative is a cooperation between three linguistic collaborative research centres in Germany, which comprise more than 40 individual research projects altogether. These projects are involved in creating manifold language resources, especially corpora, tailored to their particular needs. The aim of the project described here is to ensure an effective and sustainable access of these data by third-party researchers beyond the termination of these projects. This goal involves a number of measures, such as the definition of a common data format to completely capture the heterogeneous information encoded in the individual corpora, the development of user-friendly and sustainably usable tools for processing (e.g. querying) the data, and the specification of common inventories of metadata and terminology. Moreover, the project aims at formulating general rules of best practice for creating, accessing, and archiving linguistic resources.