Open Access

This paper uses a devil’s advocate position to highlight the benefits of metadata creation for linguistic resources. It provides an overview of the required metadata infrastructure and shows that this infrastructure is in the meantime developed by various projects and hence can be deployed by those working with linguistic resources and archiving. Possible caveats of metadata creation are mentioned starting with user requirements and backgrounds, contribution to academic merits of researchers and standardisation. These are answered with existing technologies and procedures, referring to the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI). CMDI provides an infrastructure and methods for adapting metadata to the requirements of specific classes of resources, using central registries for data categories, and metadata schemas. These registries allow for the definition of metadata schemas per resource type while reusing groups of data categories also used by other schemas. In summary, rules of best practice for the creation of metadata are given.

EXMARaLDA is a system for computer transcription of spoken discourse that is being developed at the SFB ‚Mehrsprachigkeit’ as a basis of a multilingual discourse database into which the transcriptions in use at the SFB will be integrated at a later point in time. The present paper describes the theoretical background of the development – a formal model of discourse transcription based on the annotation graph formalism (Bird/Liberman (2001)) – and its practical realisation in the form of an XML-based data format and several tools for input, output and manipulation of the data.