World Language Documentation Centre (WLDC)

As part of our work with linguistic communities GeoLang realised that there was a need for a separate organisation that would take responsibility for a number of related projects that should be community led. To this end GeoLang has founded and supported the creation of the World Language Documentation Centre; an organisation that will champion linguistic research, internationally democratic and diplomatic, worldwide. The WLDC is being formed with the formal launch planned to take place appropriately on February 21 st 2007, the day designated by UNESCO as International Mother Tongue day.

The WLDC will have a Board made up of renowned experts from around the World who are representative of (though do not necessarily represent) the variety of linguistic and computational fields concerned with the data that will form the content of the GeoLang Register and ultimately also the ISO 639-6 standard database.

The aims and objectives of the WLDC are wide and far reaching and include:

• To ensure evaluation, enrichment, maintenance and sustainability of the wealth of information about the languages of the world forming the content of the WLDC and ISO 639-6 databases.
• To liaise with the organizations that contribute information and other resources to the WLDC e.g. GeoLang Ltd as ISO 639-6 Registration Authority, BSI as ISO 639-6 Maintenance Agency, ISO 639 JAC for all ISO 639 Alpha three coded languages, OmegaWiki for community supplied information.
• To facilitate the needs of linguistic communities where a trusted party is required to act as intermediary.
• To research, facilitate and construct information on the world’s language and speech communities providing the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in witten, spoken and signed modes of communication.
• To facilitate the multi-lingual internet by providing detailed information on the writing systems of the world that will include mapping to the Unicode standard.

Membership of the The WLDC will be open to anyone showing a genuine interest in contributing towards the advancement of research, verification and validation of the data that is to be made freely available on the web site providing the ISO 639-6 code but also the GeoLang web site which will provide greatly extended data in the GeoLang Register which is the basis for ISO 639-6 Code. We envisage many people becoming members of the WLDC as a result of their contribution to content of the OmegaWiki multilingual dictionary.

For the Offical website of The World Language Documentation Centre click here