[open-linguistics] Linguistic Annotation Framework

[Christian Chiarcos]

> I'd be inclined to study this for possible adoption, but it's hard for  
> me to believe that a non-open standard will be widely adopted.

This is certainly true, but over the past decade, working on these
specifications has brought many people from the academic NLP community
together, and shaped the discussion about corpus representation
formalisms, and a number of offspring formats and alternative
instantiations are available. The development of LAF itself is well
documented in the literature and schemata and an API should be available,
so that the actual *document* may not always be necessary to adopt the  
standard as is.

I am actually wondering whether it would be possible to develop something
like an OpenLAF documentation as alternative to the official
documentation. I mean, SQL is an ISO standard as well, but I know plenty
more or less professional SQL manuals available for which I doubt that
license fees have been paid to anyone. @Nancy: Do I understand correctly
that the fee is only for the original document, not for its
application/implementation ?

Best,
Christian