The Rosetta Project is happy to announce the Pangloss project, which aims to extend the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org to allow it to interact natively with data types used by linguists working on language description. This project is being initiated by an NSF grant (BCS-0715246) funding an initial feasibility study which will focus on adding capabilities to OpenOffice.org for manipulating interlinear texts.
Interlinear texts are a special data type used by academic linguists in which sentences from a language being described are annotated with multiple lines of aligned text. The format generally consists of a sentence from the language being described on one line, followed by a line giving a word-by-word translation of the text using standardized grammatical markup conventions, followed by a free translation of the entire sentence. Other annotation lines and various kinds of metadata may also appear, depending on the needs of the creator. A simple example of such an interlinear text describing a sentence from Spanish using English as the description language is given below (abbreviations are 1PL for first person plural, and OBJ.MRKR for object marker): Lo vimos a Juan him saw.1PL OBJ.MRKR Juan "We saw Juan." In its initial phase, the Pangloss project aims to develop an extension for OpenOffice.org, written in Python, to create and transform interlinear glossed text data within the OpenOffice suite while storing the text data in an archival xml form within the OpenDocument format. The project goals include development of a proof- of-concept extension, research into standards for the encoding of interlinear glossed texts within the OpenDocument format, and recommendations for best-practice development in these areas. For more information and updates from the Pangloss project, visit: http://www.rosettaproject.org/about-us/projects/pangloss For more information about interlinear text standards, visit: http://emeld.org/school/classroom/text/standards.html We welcome any advice that members of the OpenOffice.org development community may have for us as we move forward with this project. Please contact Jeremy Fahringer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) if you have any questions or comments. -- Jeremy Fahringer [Rosetta Project: Pangloss feasibility study] http://www.rosettaproject.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
