The META-SHARE Language Resources Sharing Infrastructure: Principles, Challenges, Solutions

Language resources have become a key factor in the development cycle of language technology. The current prevailing methodologies, the sheer number of languages and the vast volumes of digital content together with the wide palette of useful content processing applications, render new models for managing the underlying language resources indispensable. This paper presents META-SHARE, an open resource exchange infrastructure, which aims to boost visibility, documentation, identification, openness and sharing, collaboration, preservation and interoperability of language data and basic language processing tools. META-SHARE is implemented as a network of distributed repositories of language resources. It offers providers and consumers of resources the necessary functionalities for describing, storing, searching, licensing and downloading language resources in a single integrated technical platform. META-SHARE favours and aligns itself with the growing open data and open source tools movement. To this end, it has prepared the necessary underlying legal framework consisting of a Charter for language resource sharing, as well as a set of licensing templates aiming to act as recommended licence models in an attempt to facilitate the legal interoperability of language resources. In its current version, META-SHARE features 13 resource repositories, with over 1200 resource packages.