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

The GOLD Community of Practice is proposed as a model for managing on-line linguistic data. 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, or ‘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 interoperable. Furthermore, a methodology is given for creating specific communities of practice within the overall scientific domain of linguistics. A number of services around the model are proposed including knowledge acquisition and search facilities. Finally, as an example of the model’s utility, an instantiation of a community of practice centered around interlinear glossed text is described.