What Does Interoperability Mean, Anyway? Toward an Operational Definition of Interoperability for Language Technology

Two major projects in the U.S. and Europe have joined in a collaboration to work toward achieving interoperability among language resources. In the U.S., the project, Sustainable Interoperability for Language Technology (SILT) has been funded by the National Science Foundation under the INTEROP program, and in Europe, FLaReNet, Fostering Language Resources Network, has been funded by the European Commission under the eContentPlus framework. This international collaborative effort involves members of the language processing community and others working in related areas to build consensus regarding the sharing of data and technologies for language resources and applications, to work towards interoperability of existing data, and, where possible, to promote standards for annotation and resource building. This paper focuses on the results of a recent workshop whose goal was to arrive at operational definitions for interoperability over four thematic areas, including metadata for describing language resources, data categories and their semantics, resource publication requirements, and software sharing.