A generic formalism to represent linguistic corpora in RDF and OWL/DL

This paper describes POWLA, a generic formalism to represent linguistic corpora by means of RDF and OWL/DL. Unlike earlier approaches in this direction, POWLA is not tied to a specific selection of annotation layers, but rather, it is designed to support any kind of text-oriented annotation. POWLA inherits its generic character from the underlying data model PAULA (Dipper, 2005; Chiarcos et al., 2009) that is based on early sketches of the ISO TC37/SC4 Linguistic Annotation Framework (Ide and Romary, 2004). As opposed to existing standoff XML linearizations for such generic data models, it uses RDF as representation formalism and OWL/DL for validation. The paper discusses advantages of this approach, in particular with respect to interoperability and queriability, which are illustrated for the MASC corpus, an open multi-layer corpus of American English (Ide et al., 2008).