ANNOUNCEMENT: OLIF V.3 Beta is available for testing on www.olif.net.

OLIF, The Open Lexicon Interchange Format, is a user-friendly means of encoding lexical/terminological data for applications of varying complexity, from simple .csv files to machine translation system lexicons. With the aim of offering a usable, all-purpose language data standard, the designers of OLIF have included a wide array of data category types, ranging from basic administrative categories, to more complex morphological, syntactic, and semantic handling. OLIF also provides a generalized syntax for the modelling of transfer conditions.

Version 2.0 of the OLIF standard was developed and released by the OLIF Consortium, a collaborative group of language technologists. Based on OLIF v.1, a prototype that was generated as part of the OTELO and Aventinus projects, OLIF v.2.0 represents an improvement to OLIF v.1 in several important ways: It is implemented as an XML DTD, offers improved coverage of the set of linguistic features that are necessary to support NLP applications, and has been expanded to support 6 European languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Danish). The XSD implementation of OLIF v.2.0 offers improved data-typing capabilities and is available as of April 2005 as OLIF v.2.1.

Led by SAP of Germany, OLIF Consortium partners include, among others, the language technology companies Trados, Global Words/Logos, LinguaTec, Systran, IBM, Basis Technology and L10nbridge, as well as the technology institutes DFKI and IAI.

This group is a forum for posting and discussing issues associated with testing and using the OLIF standard. Consortium members and other interested parties are encouraged to use the page to share their experience and knowledge of OLIF. (Note: This is an OLIF user forum; please visit the official OLIF site at www.olif.net to access OLIF and its supporting documentation.)