On Friday May 27, about 25 persons gathered in the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen to attend a workshop on the practical use of the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) for the description of language resources. CMDI is the metadata part of CLARIN, a European initiative to create a Common Language Resources Infrastructure

After a short introduction about metadata in general and a history sketch, the concepts behind CMDI were introduced: The core ideas behind the new metadata format are modularity, reusability, and the use of data categories. A special session was dedicated to the use of ISOcat, the reference implementation of a data category registry. The idea behind this is to have a dependable definition of what is meant with a data category as, for example, Part of Speech. This way it doesn’t matter how you call or spell it in your particular metadata schema, the connection to similar schemata is always clear.

After these more general introductions, the specific CMDI software was presented.

First the Component Registry was shown. It is a web application that can be used for inspecting, searching, creating and editing CMDI metadata components. Afterwards it was illustrated how to create CMDI metadata files using a version of Arbil that has been modified to directly interact with the Component Registry. Both Arbil and the Component Registry are developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and were presented by their respective developers. Although both applications are still in a development state it was clear that they can already be used now for the production of CMDI metadata.

All slides of the presentations can be downloaded from the CLARIN NL website.

More information about CMDI, including links to the software so you can try it out yourself, can be found on the main CLARIN site.

Arbil (short for “Archive Builder”) is an application for arranging research material and associated metadata into a format appropriate for archiving. It is basically the successor to the IMDI Editor, which a lot of our readers probably know. This old tool is now almost ten years old and a lot has happened in software engineering in that time. Therefore, instead of simply updating the IMDI editor to incorporate user suggestions and modern software architecture principles, the MPI has decided to create a completely new application that will replace the IMDI editor altogether.

The most obvious difference to the old IMDI Editor is that Arbil has a tabular display, which allows a comparative view on the data and the ability to copy-paste between matching sets of data.

Arbil main screen

While Arbil is primarily a tool to enter metadata, it also has functions to help organise the collected material and create a local well-organised corpus before it is archived. These functions include the ability to search for and compare metadata, and to open the resource files in associated applications, e.g. ELAN for annotations or a media player to watch videos.

Arbil's embedded image viewer

Arbil has been designed as a local application so that it can also be used offline, for instance in remote field sites. The metadata and resource files can be entered in part or as a whole; once an Internet connection is available the previously entered data and associated structures can be exported from Arbil and then be transferred to the main archive via Lamus. As the idea behind Arbil is to deal with a complete corpus or corpus branch Arbil can mirror branches from the main archive on your local computer so that they can still be referred to offline and in the field.

Unlike the IMDI Editor, Arbil incorporates the functionality of a number of separate tools while being designed around the workflow of the user. This means the application is meant to be the one program around which all your archiving work will be centered. In Arbil the metadata is viewed in tables, which can contain a single node of metadata as a list of fields, or many different nodes each with its fields as a separate row in the table. This tabular view of the data allows multiple metadata nodes to be compared across the rows of the table. If the metadata node is editable then these fields can be edited in any table in which they are viewed. Drag and drop is used extensively both for constructing a hierarchical corpus tree structure and for adding nodes to tables for viewing and editing. Bulk editing of metadata can be done primarily via copy and paste, which allows a string of text to be pasted into multiple fields of multiple rows, or to paste multiple fields into the matching fields of multiple rows.

Tabular view of multiple imdi files

The basic user interface of Arbil is highly customisable. For example, you can decide which columns of a table should be visible and save various table layouts to quickly switch between different views to accommodate for different tasks. Furthermore, columns can be resized, sorted on any column and reordered. Rows can easily be added and then dragged from one table to another, and the cells can be highlighted based on matching text.

With all the various metadata fields it is not always easy to see at a glance what a particular fields is intended for and which fields are specifically required. For this reason a description of the intended usage for each field is displayed in a tool tip. Similarly an indication of which fields are required is given by a textual and colour highlight when the data is not filled in. Likewise in the case of fields requiring specific formatting, such as date fields, the cell and the table will be highlighted when the formatting is incorrect.

Arbil window style

In contrast to the IMDI Editor Arbil is more of a team-player, which means that there are various import and export facilities. Any valid IMDI files can be imported into Arbil. If the metadata refers to resource files, they can optionally be imported at the same time, for instance when migrating or merging from one computer to another. All of the IMDI data and the associated resources within Arbil can be exported into a self-contained directory. The exported files can then be uploaded into LAMUS where any new corpus branches can be uploaded and existing sessions that have been edited can be replaced. During both the import and export processes, all of the metadata is validated and a list of warnings are given if there are any errors. The textual data entered into Arbil can be exported in formats other than IMDI, for instance the contents of a table can be copied and pasted into a text editor or into spreadsheet. A custom style-sheet can be used to transform and export the data in a particular format. The tables used in Arbil can also be embedded in a web page, where the table’s contents, size, columns and highlighting will be displayed in the resulting web page.

Arbil continues to be actively developed to extend these features further and to make the user experience as pleasant as possible. Why don’t you try it out yourself?

• Try Arbil
• Read the Arbil Manual
• Go to the Arbil Forum