Hi, I'm Laura Welcher from the Long Now Foundation.
I direct a project called the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of information
about all of the world's languages.
And I'm actually up here to present a poster to you tonight.
But it turns out that I was the only one who brought a poster.
So rather than stand up here with my big piece of paper in a really small print, I thought
I would kind of wing it and show you what we have online.
And we have a fair amount of stuff online.
So the Rosetta Project has really two big parts to it.
We're building this archive, this large collection of information on all of the world's languages.
And there are about 7,000 of those.
But what most people see, what people know the Rosetta Project for is this millennial
Rosetta disk that we're building.
So this is like a backup version that can last for thousands of years.
So the web presence we've always had has these two kind of sides to it.
If you go to our website today, one of the main features we have on our landing page
is this interactive version of the disk.
And so we've actually built this prototype of this very long-term archive.
But behind this is actually one of the largest collections of information on human language
that's available publicly on the net.
And while there are other archives out there on human language, they're actually organized
quite a bit differently than ours is.
We're one of only about three sites that actually has information on all of the world's languages.
Most archives are much more specialized, having to do with a small group of languages or individual
languages.
And we're also really different in that most language archives, because they have sensitive
cultural information, they have very complicated systems of permissions that you have to navigate
in order to be able to access the collections.
We've actually sidestepped that.
And everything in our collection is open and publicly available, which makes us pretty
different in the landscape of these other archival entities.
But I think one of the reasons that I was asked to come and speak at this particular
workshop, because this isn't specifically about personal archiving, but we have to wrestle
with some of the same kinds of issues.
And one of them is limited sets of resources in order to be able to maintain this digital
collection.
We're a nonprofit, and we work on government and private grants, and the maintenance and
development of large web collections can actually be quite expensive.
And we used to try to maintain it all in-house.
We used to try to build our own archival back end and manage all of our metadata.
And it was just, it was very complicated.
We never really built it to a level that I was particularly satisfied with.
And so a couple of years ago, we decided to actually scrap the whole thing.
We'd actually built an entire website out in a content management system and had this
very complex structure.
We decided this was not working.
We're not going to be able to maintain it.
So we basically tossed everything out and then said, OK, now what are we going to do?
So we took all of the content in our collection, which amounts to probably over 100,000 scanned
pages at the time of language documentation, which isn't a lot in the era of Google scanning,
but it's all highly vetted and it's all connected to individual human languages that we've actually
rectified.
So we moved all of our content over into this wonderful resource called the Internet Archive,
where we have a special collection.
And so here you can see all of the items that are in our collection that reside here in
the Internet Archive.
What you may notice is that this is just one big, huge list.
What you don't see, this is kind of the user's perspective when they kind of land on our
page and they want to browse.
It's not really intended for that.
This is actually where we manage all of the collection and we provide, we enrich the metadata.
But if you wanted to find something, it is actually quite difficult.
You would need to know what the language code is or the language name, and people don't
know, there's different ways to spell language names and a lot of people don't even know
what a particular language name is, after all, there's 7,000 of them.
So this isn't a particularly good way to browse the collection, but it's not really intended
to be.
What does work is if you actually build your interfaces outside of the Internet Archive.
So use the Internet Archive as your long-term repository and build the structure for your
interface somewhere else.
So what we did is we used a free cloud service called Freebase, which is an open contribution
database.
And the idea behind Freebase is to structure the semantic web, but not from the top down,
but from the bottom up through user contribution.
So users contribute data sets that they think are interesting and they want to develop and
then you can link them to all of the other data sets in Freebase.
So we took all of our metadata about language, so there's a large taxonomy of relationships
between languages, kind of like you have species taxonomies, and other kinds of information
like the kinds of documents in our collection, and we populated that all in Freebase.
And so you see here this is the Rosetta language base inside of Freebase, but it's linked to
all of the other data that resides in Freebase.
And this topic area called Langoid has 10,000 topics, so those are all of the languages
and they're actually linked all to each other in terms of language relationships.
And we used this data set, this metadata about language, to push a static wiki of the world's
languages with one page for every human language and links between them.
So to give you an example, this is a page that's actually a fairly well populated page
for French.
And all of the information that you see down here in the classification taxonomy allows
you to navigate to all of the other language pages.
This is for the Romance language family in Indo-European, but you can get to any other
language family.
All of the data up in here is data that's coming from elsewhere in Freebase that we're
linking to.
All of the data up in here are descriptions that we pulled in from Wikipedia.
We actually rectified about 400 pages, no, I'm sorry, probably about 1,000 pages on human
language in Wikipedia to our collection, so we were able to draw those in.
Here's a map that's contributed from another project called the LLmap project, which is
completely external to our project, so they allowed us to use that URL.
And then all of the documents down here are linking to items that we have in the Internet
Archive.
So what this represents is actually a distributed system where you have the content in one place,
you have kind of the data structure in another place, and then you have another place where
you're building out an interface, or maybe you have multiple interfaces.
And I've actually been talking to my other colleagues who are building linguistic archives
about this, because I think it's a pretty robust model for maintaining your archive
in the long run, if any of the pieces look precarious.
So Freebase was acquired by Google last year, and they have a commitment to keep that data
set open.
But if something happened in the future and we needed to move the data around, as long
as you can get your data in and get your data out, then you're in, you should be in fairly
good shape.
So what I think we've built is something that's fairly recession-proof, too.
We're relying all on cloud services, so there's no service here that we actually have to pay
for and maintain ourselves.
So we are able to piggyback on the resources of many other generous organizations.
And where it looks like this is going in the future, there's a couple of new directions
that one is because we've kind of built out this wiki interface, one of the things we're
potentially interested in doing is elaborating that as a wiki of information on all human
languages.
And so we did a presentation at the Wikimedia Conference last year about this, and that's
one possibility down the road.
I think another great possibility for it would be, I've been admiring the Encyclopedia of
Life, and there's much about the Encyclopedia of Life that could be ported over into the
domain of human language.
But one nearer future for this distributed archive model is a project called the Language
Commons, which Rosetta is one of the organizations that's leading this particular effort.
And the goal is to build a site for all human languages that works to promote open public
data sets for all of the languages and to better enable their online future.
And the Language Commons backend is actually also here at the Internet Archive.
And so what may happen in the near future is kind of a merger of the Language Commons
and the Rosetta Project backend to become the future of the Language Commons proper,
which would be a site for information on all the world's languages.
Any questions?
Thank you.