LMF - Historical Context and Perspectives

The importance of designing standards for language resources (LR) is firmly established, starting with the Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering (EAGLES) and International Standards for Language Engineering (ISLE) initiatives. Both EAGLES and ISLE stress the importance of reaching a consensus on (linguistic and nonlinguistic) "content", in addition to agreement on formats and encoding issues, and also address the needs of content processing and Semantic Web technologies. The recommendations for standards and best practices issued within the projects became, through the INTERA and mainly the LIRICS project, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) within the ISO TC37/SC4 committee, where Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) was developed. Standards are fundamental to exchange, preserve, maintain and integrate data and LRs, to achieve interoperability in general, and they are an essential basis of any LR infrastructure.