Photo: Photothèque Inria
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) appointed DARIAH’s director Laurent Romary as chairman of its Technical Committee “Terminology and other language and content resources” (ISO/TC 37). Laurent said, “I am very happy to further contribute to the interoperability of resources, which are used and produced by researchers in digital linguistics”.
Since many years Laurent is involved in various efforts to improve the standardization and thus accessibility as well as linking of digital resources. “Standards are a key to great digital research, which helps to discover and understand our cultural and societal life”, he describes as his motivation.
ISO Technical Commitee 37
The ISO Technical Committee 37 covers the standardization of principles, methods and applications relating to terminology and other language and content resources in the contexts of multilingual communication and cultural diversity. It was set up in 1947 and has since published a total number of 45 standards.
Laurent will chair the committee for six years. His nomination was proposed by the committee’s Chinese secretariat. It received strong support from the French national organization for standardization AFNOR (Association Française de Normalisation) and the German Institute for Standardization (DIN).
Laurent Romary and ISO
It is not the first time Laurent works with ISO. He edited the ISO 16642 standard (TMF – Terminological Markup Framework) under TC37/SC3, and he had already been charing the ISO sub-committee TC 37/SC 4, which published 18 ISO standards since its creation in 2001. Laurent also contributed for many years to the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) consortium.
Since 2011 Laurent is a member and president of the DARIAH Board of Directors. He is also a Research Director for INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation.
Laurent did his PhD in computational linguistics in 1989 and his Habilitation thesis in 1999. For several years, he has lead the Langue et Dialogue research team at Loria (http://www.loria.fr/) and conducted various projects on man-machine dialogue, multilingual document management and linguistic engineering. Over the years, he has been particularly active in defending open access and open science policies within the CNRS, the Max Planck society, Inria and of course DARIAH.
An overview of his publications can be found on HAL open archives, which is a DARIAH contribution: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/laurentromary/