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Despite its scientific, political, and practical value, comprehensive information about human languages, in all their variety and complexity, is not readily obtainable and searchable. One reason is that many language data are collected as audio and video recordings which imposes a challenge to document indexing and retrieval. Annotation of multimedia data provides an opportunity for making the semantics explicit and facilitates the searching of multimedia documents. We have developed OntoELAN, an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotator that features: (1) support for loading and displaying ontologies specified in OWL; (2) creation of a language profile, which allows a user to choose a subset of terms from an ontology and conveniently rename them if needed; (3) creation of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) saving annotations in the XML format as Multimedia Ontology class instances and, linked to them, class instances of other ontologies used in ontological tiers. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation., Comment: Appeared in the Proceedings of the IEEE Sixth International Symposium on Multimedia Software Engineering (IEEE-MSE'04), pp. 329-336, Miami, FL, USA, December, 2004

A number of serious reasons will convince an increasing amount of researchers to store their relevant material in centers which we will call "language resource archives". They combine the duty of taking care of long-term preservation as well as the task to give access to their material to different user groups. Access here is meant in the sense that an active interaction with the data will be made possible to support the integration of new data, new versions or commentaries of all sort. Modern Language Resource Archives will have to adhere to a number of basic principles to fulfill all requirements and they will have to be involved in federations to create joint language resource domains making it even more simple for the researchers to access the data. This paper makes an attempt to formulate the essential pillars language resource archives have to adhere to.