The LRE Map disclosed

The LRE Map is an initiative started in conjunction with LREC2010.1 It was conceived as a campaign for collecting information about the language resources and technologies (Calzolari et al., 2010) underlying the scientific work presented at that conference. The initiative continued with LREC2012, where the role of a coherent and rich documentation of Language Resources (LRs) was clearly identified and pushed to the community, (Calzolari et al., 2012). The rationale behind the LRE Map is the indisputable need of accurate and reliable documentation of LRs to make them really “existing” and available. In this paper we present a new “vision” for the LRE Map, moving the data of the map from the database2 towards the world of the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data ((L)LOD).3 (L)LOD are still quantitatively a minority within the linked data cloud, (Chiarcos et al., 2011; Chiarcos et al., 2012) but they are growing (Lezcano et al., 2013) and becoming a central modality for linguistic data publication. The LRE Map, though not big in number of triples, has a significant specific weight since it contains a manually developed/checked normalization of all data contained in the database. The advantage of rendering the LRE Map in RDF/XML (in the following RDF) is the immediate connection to big resources, (Wikipedia, Dbpedia etc.) that are in nuce in some metadata of the map, namely the URL and the documentation. In addition, as a component of the linguistic cloud, the LRE Map will be visible and accessible to a wider community.