Abstract
This paper presents the design and implementation of the Ontology for Accessing Transcription Systems (OATS), a knowledge base that supports interoperation over disparate transcription systems and practical orthographies. OATS uses RDF, SPARQL and Unicode to facilitate resource discovery and intelligent search over linguistic data. The knowledge base includes an ontological description of writing systems and relations for mapping transcription system segments to an interlingua pivot, the IPA. It includes orthographic and phonemic inventories from 203 African languages, which were mined from the Web. OATS is motivated by four use cases: querying data in the knowledge base via IPA, querying it in native orthography, error checking of digitized data, and conversion between transcription systems. The model in this paper implements each of these use cases.
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Notes
ISO 639-3 language codes are in [ ].
Phonemic and phonetic representations are given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Practical orthographies are intended to jump-start written materials development by correlating a writing system with its sound units, making it easier for speakers to master and acquire literacy.
Kohrt (1986) provides a history of the term grapheme.
The phoneme /d/ has morphologically conditioned allographs <d> (word initial) or <r> (elsewhere) (McGill 2004).
See Scannell, this volume, for discussion on the simplification of orthographies in African languages into plain ASCII.
Guóji\({\overline{\hbox{a}}}\) Bi\({\overline{\hbox{a}}}\)ozhǔ, the national standard character set for the People’s Republic of China.
ISO/IEC 1064.
I have chosen to use a Document class instead of a Language class because transcription systems and phonemic inventories may vary between documents that describe the same language.
For a list of these languages, see: http://phoible.org.
This is work that I am currently undertaking for the Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon project. See: http://phoible.org.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie and thanks go to Bernard Comrie, Jeff Good and Michael Cysouw. For helpful comments and reviews, I thank Emily Bender, Scott Farrar, Sharon Hargus, Will Lewis, Dan McCloy, Richard Wright, and three anonymous reviewers.
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Moran, S. An ontology for accessing transcription systems. Lang Resources & Evaluation 45, 345–360 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9158-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9158-8