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Piotr Banski edited this page May 27, 2021 · 6 revisions

Welcome to the CQLF wiki!

This page should be considered work in progress until we know how much documentation we need/want to place here, and how to structure it in an accessible manner.

Basic terms and publicly available information

CQLF stands for Corpus Query Lingua Franca. This term is used for a family of ISO standards that encode the commonalities among various corpus query languages as well as the possible range of differences between them.

There are currently two standards in the ISO family:

  • ISO 24623-1:2018 Language resource management — Corpus query lingua franca (CQLF) — Part 1: Metamodel
  • ISO/DIS 24623-2 Language resource management — Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF) — Part 2: Ontology

Part 2 of the CQLF family encodes (roughly speaking) the structure of an ontology of corpus query language features. Much of the content of that ontology needs to be (and in some cases, already has been) supplied by corpus query language creators and users. This site is intended to be the community hub for both users of corpus query languages (when they search for query languages that could satisfy their research needs) and for corpus query language creators (to look up what functionalities are possible or sought for, and to provide data on their products, so that end users could locate them more easily).

CQLF Ontology: Moderated community process

Only the top layer of the Expressive Power taxonomy of the CQLF Ontology is in the normative scope of the published ISO CQLF-2 standard. The lower layers of Frames and Use Cases – as well as conformance statements for particular CQLs – are expected to be supplied by the community in a moderated process of extending the ontology. An initial version of the extended ontology, documenting the CQP and ANNIS CQLs, is provided at the following URL: https://github.com/cqlf-ontology/cqlf/blob/DIS2020/CQLF-2.owl

A GitHub organization called cqlf-ontology has been set up as the locus for the community effort. The organization provides a storage place for the CQLF-2 ontology and the surrounding infrastructure, including, among others, versioning capabilities, an integrated ticketing system and a wiki for dynamic documentation. The home page of the organization is: https://github.com/cqlf-ontology/

The list below summarizes the main features of the envisioned community process:

  • Authentication:
    • via GitHub, the ontology can only be edited directly by users whose accounts are members of the GitHub organization cqlf-ontology;
    • other users can submit pull requests, e.g. with conformance statements for a new (or newly added) CQL, or with entries for new Frames and Use Cases.
  • Version control: All submissions are automatically recorded together with a date stamp and the account name of the submitter. A release system is used to freeze the particular versions of the ontology that accompany the current and future versions of the ISO international standard (this document).
  • Ontology extension: The community is expected to extend the ontology with new Frames, Use Cases and conformance statements, submitted in the form of pull requests. Among others, CQL developers are expected to provide conformance statements regarding the CQLs that they maintain.
  • Moderation: Members of the GitHub organization cqlf-ontology review pull requests and ensure that they meet all requirements laid down in the present document. Existing Frames and Use Cases are considered immutable and will only be modified or retracted under exceptional circumstances by the moderators.
  • QA: It is expected that users ensure the well-formedness of the ontology with their modifications before they initiate a pull request. Filters/hooks on pull requests will be set up to assist in this.
  • Moderation, error reporting and the verification of the submitted conformance statements will be driven by the ticketing system automatically coordinated with pull requests.
  • It is expected that there will be an easy-to-use Web interface that allows end users to browse the ontology and identify CQLs that support Frames and Use Cases matching their needs.

Namespace

The CQLF namespace identifier is maintained by the CLARIN Standards Committee (under the ISO TC37 SC4 - CLARIN ERIC liaison).

The namespace is https://www.clarin.eu/standards/cqlf

Releases

Releases, apart from their general uses, are our way of freezing the project state for the purpose of sustainably referencing it from the text of the ISO standard.

The first, test release to demonstrate this is to be found at https://github.com/cqlf-ontology/cqlf/releases/tag/v0.5.0

Documentation on GitHub releases can be found at https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/releasing-projects-on-github