Presentations

Abstract

KinOath is a kinship and archive retrieval application under development by Peter Withers at the Language Archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen. It is designed to be flexible and culturally nonspecific, such that culturally different social structures can equally be represented. By linking archived data to kinship individuals, queries can be performed to retrieve the archive data based on kinship relations. The application is nearing beta release and some of the recently added features are; multiple diagram types such as freeform or kin term etc., matrimonial ring diagrams from kin type strings, customisable kin types, export to R or SPSS, customisable metadata via the Clarin Component Registry and ISOCat, improved kin type string database queries and browse-able kin trees. This talk will give an introduction to the application, discussing the current features as well as those that have yet to become available.

Abstract

We describe our computer-supported framework to overcome the rule of metadata schism. It combines the use of controlled vocabularies, managed by a data category registry, with a component-based approach, where the categories can be combined to yield complex metadata structures. A metadata scheme devised in this way will thus be grounded in its use of categories. Schema designers will profit from existing prefabricated larger building blocks, motivating re-use at a larger scale. The common base of any two metadata schemes within this framework will solve, at least to a good extent, the semantic interoperability problem, and consequently, further promote systematic use of metadata for existing resources and tools to be shared.