Minutes of the Business Meeting, Jan. 24, 2002
First International Conference of the Global WordNet Association
Mysore, India (Jan. 21-25, 2002)

The meeting was open to all attendees. 
Presiding were GWA board members Piek Vossen (PV), Christiane 
Fellbaum (CF) and Palmira Marrafa (PM). 


1. Opening

At 3 PM, PV opened the Business Meeting by welcoming everyone. 
PV gave an overview of the activities of GWA in its first 
1.5 year of existence.

The main activities included:
- development of the web site
- issuing a newsletter
- organization of the 1st International GWA Conference

He noted that the GWA has been operating on a voluntary basis 
and invited everyone to contribute ideas and share some of the 
responsibilites involved in running the organization. 


2. GWA Membership

PM discussed membership. Presently, the GWA has only a handful of 
members. To encourage more people to join, it was decided that 
membership fees would be waived for all attendees starting now 
and including the next meeting, when new attendees will have to 
become paying members. Membership is available via the website. 

3. Communication among members 

PV noted the need for more communication among the members. 
Suggestions included a (non-edited) mailing list, announcements of 
WordNet-related products and publications available for downloading, 
a membership list with addresses, and a bibliography. PV stressed 
again that such services must be supported by volunteer members. 
A proposal was made for an electronic journal, and CIIL members 
offered to take the initiative in this endeavor. 

Further, a web-site with its own domain (not linked to the University 
of Amsterdam) would be desirable. Prof. Udaya Narayan Singh offered to 
establish a website based at the CIIL in Mysore. 


4. Standardization

PV addressed the question of standardization for all wordnets. 
Standards must be developed with respect to these points: 
(a) lexical and semantic relations (both content and labelling);
(b) a representation (such as XML, as developed by IRST and Brno);
(c) the database
(d) shared tools 

A  workshop on standardization will be held at the LREC meeting 
in Grand Canaria, Spain (May 2002). 

The question was raised as to what the current standard was. It was 
decided that the Princeton WordNet was the basic standard, and that 
individual wordnets could map their own systems onto this standard. 
New wordnets can (and should) contain additions (including syntax). 
Adding sub-domains was a concern for several delegates. Prof. Pushpak 
Bhattacharya from IIT Mumbai offered help in standardization based 
on his work on Hindi WordNet and Asia WordNet (esp. standardization 
of glosses and core vocabulary). He also offered help in producing 
semantically tagged corpora.

A suggestion was made to do work on standardizing and maintaining 
the ILI as well.

Offers were made by German Rigau for their web based system and Pavel Smrz
for VisDic.
VisDic may become a public open source database for wordnet. 

Industrial tools and interfaces are also available and should be shared 
as much as possible. 

The standardized XML format should be the proper way for exchange of data
between database systems. Arthur Cater strongly suggested to support
multiple formats in addition. Any tool should for example also be able to
export to and import from Princeton database format.
Work on standardization is also voluntary and can thus not take the scope of
funded projects such as EAGLES and ISLE that involve many parties and
meetings.

Support for wordnets in lesser known languages, such as India's tribal 
languages, was expressed. 


5. Future Meetings

CF invited bids for the next meeting. A tentative projected date 
is January, 2004. Care must be taken not to overlap with other meetings, 
such as LREC and ACL, that tend to include either full WordNet workshops 
or numerous papers on WordNet-related work. It is desirable to hold meetings 
in places that are accessible to colleagues without large travel funds. 

CF reminded everyone that running a meeting is costly both in terms of 
manpower and money, and that the organization at present has no funds 
to help out. Interest in organizing the next meeting had been expressed 
informally during the meeting by Sofia Stamou (Patras, Greece) and Pavel Smrz 
(Brno, Czech Republic). 


The meeting was adjourned at 5 P.M. 



Respectfully submitted, 

Christiane Fellbaum 
Princeton, NJ
February 4, 2002