Interoperability Framework: The FLaReNet action plan proposal

Standards are fundamental to ex-change, preserve, maintain and integrate data and language resources, and as an essential basis of any language resource infrastructure. This paper promotes an Interoperability Framework as a dynamic environment of standards and guidelines, also intended to support the provision of language-(web)service interoperability. In the past two decades, the need to define common practices and formats for linguistic resources has been increasingly recognized and sought. Today open, collaborative, shared data is at the core of a sound language strategy, and standardisation is actively on the move. This paper first describes the current landscape of standards, and presents the major barriers to their adoption; then, it describes those scenarios that critically involve the use of standards and provide a strong motivation for their adoption; lastly, a series of actions and steps needed to operationalise standards and achieve a full interoperability for Language Resources and Technologies are proposed.