Has the time come to collaboratively develop the software the language industry needs? To be more creative than any single company by sharing ideas, effort and costs? Instead of being suspicious competitors, is the language industry ready to work together and share ideas? Many companies in the industry express the need for tools, which - truly support Open Standards - can be extended, customized and integrated the way they need it - are driven by the latest research - are well supported - are affordable The OSELI initiative hopes to achieve traction.

1. +
Open Source Ecosystem
for Language Industry
The concept.
Serge Gladkoff, GALA Board Member, President, Logrus International
Seville 2015, March 21, 2015
O S E L I
Implementing sustainable Open
Source software development for the
language industry

2. +
Why Software
 The object of the language industry is not constrained by
borders, the primary product is fully global in electronic form.
 The industry actors are global resources, scalable and
transformable by communication technologies, Big Data,
advances in AI and MT, large scale sourcing.
 Linguistic assets are doubling every two years.
 ALL industry aspects are transformable by software.
Software will continue to transform the say this industry
operates.

3. +
The disruption continues to grow
 The technology is more important than ever
 The cost of software development is going down rapidly
 Collaboration is getting easier and feature-rich
 Many walls and barriers are down
 Self-organizational mechanisms are kicking in

4. +
Why Open Source
 Users do not want proprietary lock in
 Users want lower TCO and license fees
 Users want affordable participation in R&D
 Users need Open Source to complement proprietary tools
 Users believe that they understand the needs and the processes
better
 Users want engagement, participation, competitive advantage and
added value demonstrated to the clients
 Your need to be engaged, otherwise you’ll be behind no matter how
fast you buy new software!

5. +
Economic significance
and growth
Open source is in wide use in enterprises
● In a large 2009 survey, Forrester
Research found that 46% of all
responding enterprises were using or
implementing open source software [1]
Most software firms use open source in
products
● In 2009 Gartner Group estimated that
by 2012, at least 80% of all software
product firms will use open source
software in their products [2]
[1] Jeffrey S. Hammond. “Open Source Software Goes
Mainstream.” Forrester Research: 2009.
[2] Mark Driver. “Key Issues for Open Source
Software, 2010.” Gartner Research: 2010

6. +
Motivation to cooperate
 Share for everyone to gain: “I share an apple, you share an
apple, we both have two apples.”
 Save money on R&D and tools: “Some people spend time
to save money, some spend money to save time.” [3]
 PR, advertising and sales opportunity.
 Opportunity to be strategic for those who believe that the
software is the key factor to the change.
 Pool resources to play in a higher league together.
 Lower the cost of bridging the idea and implementation.
[3] Marten Mickos. “Open for Business.” Talk at PARC Forum, 2010.

7. +
Mind the Gap
The chasm between ideas and research is to be
covered by the ready to be used structure and
framework to kick start the project to close the gap.
Ideas
Research
Industry
Production
Deployment

8. +
The Steps to Close the Gap
IDEA born from R&D
project, conference
discussion,
discussion group, etc.
Initiative group is
formed (TC)
Requirements are
drafted and agreed
Project Group is
formed, Charter is
drafted, Support is
gained
Funding and support
is sought
Development is
started
Testing and
deployment, updates
and fixes
On-going community
support

9. +
Things that OSELI should be
Platform
Framework
Ecosystem
• Collaboration
• Co-development
• Documents
• Guidelines
• Community
• Forum

10. +
OSELI structure
Open, standards-based, open formats
Plug-in architecture
Open, documented API for all features
Modular (let each piece do what it does best,
but ensure pieces work together)

11. +
What types of software/tools?
Obvious targets:
 CAT tools
 Task management
 Workflow control
 Translation quality check
 Quality evaluation
 Translation Memory
 Terminology management
More difficult to tackle:
 Networked translation
resources
 Perfect file
filters/converters
 International
spelling/grammar checkers
 Text enrichment (named
entities, disambiguation)
 Tokenizers, parsers, other
NLP tools

12. +
DISCUSSION
Please, forward your questions and feedback to:
GALA CRISP: crisp@gala-global.org
Aljoscha Burchardt <aljoscha.burchardt@dfki.de>,
Serge Gladkoff <sgladkoff@gala-global.org>,
Marc Mittag (MittagQI) <marc@mittagqi.com>,
John Moran <moranj3@cs.tcd.ie>