Versions of the overheads from my plenary talk at
the 30th ISFC in Lucknow in December 2003
where I argued for the necessity
of an initiative of this kind are available here.

What this website is for...

Computational tools and mechanisms now exist that make the provision of a collection of linguistic analyses both possible and re-usable. Such a collection is highly attractive for further research, for teaching, and for documenting the state of development of theory and practice. Information of this kind is currently lacking within systemic-functional linguistics, which places it at a severe disadvantage compared with other current linguistic theories.

Putting together such a collection requires a community effort and to orchestrate such an effort standards need to be established for the representation of the linguistic information involved. This website is intended to collect together current thinking about how such standards might look, to provide tools and pointers to tools for creating linguistic analyses in the forms required, and to gather together collections of analyses as they become available.

Methods

There are now many tools that help perform and record systemic-functional analyses in machine-readable forms. Problematic until now is that all such tools are only partial, have differing capabilities, and do not readily support free interchange between different tools and between different users.

This site will not only provide information about the current state of available tools but will also attempt to provide mechanisms for re-using analyses across different tools and for making the analyses generally accessible for further use.

Techniques The main backbone of techniques to be employed are being based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the now considerable range of tools that are being provided for processing information marked up in this form. XML-style standards will be proposed for representing the linguistic constructs of systemic-functional linguistics independently of any particular tool or application. New tools supporting import/export of information in this form will be able to draw on existing analyses, to extend those analyses, to draw conclusions based on them, and much more.
Starting points

Many of the starting points described in this initial version of the website will be drawn from our experience in standardized markup for linguistic annotation and the development of broad-coverage systemic-functional grammars for natural language generation with the KPML systemic-functional linguistic development environment.

This should not remain the case: there is substantial experience in creating machine-readable, processable and presentable analyses available in the systemic-functional community and this should all feed into the information maintained here.

The more input that comes in from other groups, the more we can make this a general resource for the systemic community that reflects the scope of theory and analysis in systemic-functional linguistics worldwide. Input and commentary from everyone is therefore very necessary!

The site proper ... starts here.
 
John Bateman, University of Bremen
January 2004