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Yunseok RHEE
Professor, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
(Seoul, South Korea)
A Web-Based Participation Model
to Preserve Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
1. Introduction
One of the main challenges in preserving linguistic and cultural diversity is to
encourage small indigenous nations to use their own languages at all possible
circumstances. In reality, however, such possibilities are getting rare even in
cyberspace. Fortunately, recent advances in information and communication
technologies give a new potential to help minor languages be more widely used
and sustained.
By far the Web has been mostly used to share static information. With the
advent of Web 2.0, however, its role is significantly extended to facilitate users’
participation and collaboration beyond information sharing. Wikipedia, an
Internet-based encyclopedia, might be a representative collaboration work
enabled by such new features. Collective collaborations enable effectively
filing up a huge volume of linguistic and cultural information, and sharing
and reviewing the information-base among open communities. Webbased
participations, in addition, support easy and efficient composition in
information or service which might result in more valuable and newer outputs.
In the end, they could open a totally new horizon differentiated from typical
information sharing model.
In this report, we present a web-based participation model to support linguistic
and cultural diversity, and discuss alternatives to design the model in some
crucial aspects. The participation model includes key features to deal with
linguistic and cultural assets: collection, review, and publication. It is designed
to ultimately promote users’ participation, and to embrace a diversity of
linguistic and cultural information in terms of information characteristics and
sources. Especially, such design consideration is required in the circumstance
where diverse and heterogeneous devices including mobile systems are getting
popular, and with parallel, the representation of linguistic and cultural data
would be also diverse and complicated.
For the purpose, our model is designed to allow a self-defined data
representation in which a user can provide his/her own data. It has no doubt
that such data representations should be effectively handled by computers as
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