Open-Source Platform for Language Service Sharing

The Language Grid is an infrastructure for enabling users to share language services developed by language specialists and end user communities. Users can also create new services to support their intercultural/multilingual activities by composing various language services. In the Language Grid, there are several stakeholders with different incentives: service users, service providers, and a Language Grid operator. For enhancing the language service sharing, it is significant that the Language Grid can coordinate them to match their incentives. However, their incentives vary with the operation model of the Language Grid. To support the various operation models, the Language Grid should employ not a general platform dealing with various types of operation models, but a customizable platform. To this end, we have developed an open-source platform consisting of two types of components: core components and optional components. The former assures interoperability of Language Grids, while the latter provides flexibility of system configuration. It allows developers to extend the platform, and each operator to adapt the platform to his/her operation model by selecting the components. To validate the customizability, we have constructed the private Language Grid for Wikimedia using the same platform as public Language Grid.