THE WORK OF TODAY’S TC/37 IN THE LIGHT OF ‘CONTENT INTEROPERABILITY’ STANDARDIZATION AS AN ISSUE OF CORPUS PLANNING TAKING ELEARNING AS AN EXAMPLE

Abstract

This paper argues that there is a need for (1) standards to provide the requirements, rules and guidelines for global content interoperability, (2) coordinated strategies to enforce such standards (e.g. by means of certification schemes), (3) measures to guarantee that these standards are widely respected in ICT system development. “Content" here is seen as structured content at the level of lexical semantics comprising linguistic and non-linguistic representations of concepts or “objects" (incl. concepts understood as “immaterial objects"). There is a proliferation of web-based content platforms that offer users one or multiple resources on the one hand, and a lack of theoretical-methodological foundation as well as a lack of orientation at best practices and content interoperability on the other hand. A combination of means, such as standards, appropriate software, certification schemes, etc. is necessary to assure the quality – i.e. first of all reliability – of structured content. This would help to avoid a further deterioration of today’s more or less chaotic development of content resources (involving a huge duplication of efforts), or at least lead to a situation where those repositories containing reliable content are clearly marked.