Wee-Ta-Ra-Sha-Ro, Head Chief of the Wichita. Painted by George Catlin in 1834. Image courtesy Indigenouspeople.net

The creation story of the Wichita people tells of a creator, “Man-never-known-on-Earth,” who formed the world, land, water and the first man and woman: “Man-with-the-Power-to-Carry-Light” and “Bright-Shining-Woman.” This couple brought to the Earth light, corn-growing, deer-hunting, game-playing and prayer, before becoming the morning star and the moon.

While the story itself is preserved in literature for antiquity (e.g., in George Dorsey’s 1904 book The Mythology of the Wichita), fewer than 10 people today can tell the story in the Wichita language, nearly all of whom are elders living on tribal lands in Oklahoma, USA.

It’s a pattern repeated around the world; many languages are endangered or dying. Preserving these languages is vital for groups seeking to revitalize and maintain their culture.

Linguists have been recording and documenting endangered languages for as long as there has been recording equipment, or about 120 years. What has been lacking — until now — is a central place to search and access these data stores, which are scattered around the world. To remedy this, the CLARIN project is studying and preparing to provide comprehensive language research and preservation tools.

CLARIN, or Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, began preparing its infrastructure in 2008. At the end of 2010, it expects to move into the construction phase. Its goal is seamless access to language archives and applications; by doing so, CLARIN hopes to become an invaluable tool for helping to document and understand our languages — and therefore understand ourselves.

The newest edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger totes up 6,000 world languages — and counts 2,500 as endangered and 200 as lost. The interactive atlas ranks the 2,500 endangered languages by five levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. Image courtesy UNESCO

An advantage to all

Many sectors of society will benefit, say CLARIN’s creators.

For instance, an educator or government official reviewing educational policy could search stored archives of childrens’ recordings in her country. Using this information, she could then compare indicators of linguistic sophistication — breadth of vocabulary for example — among children of the same age from different regions in her country, or perhaps compare the language skills of boys and girls within the same age group.

Similarly, a historian researching a given politician could determine the frequency with which he used a certain word or phrase in a given month, year or decade. This kind of data could illuminate the germination of a political idea or movement.

Or a dictionary writer could clarify and expand a word’s meaning based upon the syntax and phrases commonly associated with that entry.

And a teacher seeking to expand his students’ horizons could show them language systems radically different from their own. One example of the latter is Kuuk Thaayorre, spoken by aboriginal people of Far North Queensland, Australia — a language which contains no word for left and right. Directions (north, south, east and west) do the job instead. Consequently, its speakers have a heightened spatial awareness, states linguistic researcher Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, in an article in the website Edge:

“ . . . you have to say things like ‘There's an ant on your southeast leg’ or ‘Move the cup to the north-northwest a little bit.’ One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is ‘Where are you going?’ and the answer should be something like ‘South- southeast, in the middle distance. . . ’ ”

Most likely you and I, in the absence of a compass, wouldn’t be able to get past “Hello.”

Unusual Challenges

To create such a repository means overcoming a variety of challenges. “The needs of our users — as well as the needs of our sources — present some interesting problems,” says Martin Wynne, a member of CLARIN. For example, patient confidentiality must be preserved, and intellectual property rights respected. Consequently, sign-on to the CLARIN infrastructure will offer differing levels of access, with data from medical patients or children restricted, and recorded songs might be offered by only for academics, and not to commercial musicians.

More unusually, some data must be removed once the source dies.

The reason?

Upon the death of a Pitjantjatjara-speaking Aborigine in central Australia (near Uluru, or “Ayers Rock”), for example, anything associated with that person — such as photographs or recordings — temporarily becomes taboo for prolonged mourning periods lasting months or even years. Even the person’s name is not spoken, instead the phrase “Kuminjay” is substituted, in what anthropologists term “avoidance language.”

As a result, “We’ll have an ethical obligation to cut access to recordings of that person,” says CLARIN’S Peter Wittenberg.

Like a jigsaw puzzle

Besides the ethical considerations, the team needs to make sure that sources drawn upon by the CLARIN catalogue are reliable and persistent. A PhD student using CLARIN as a source for his thesis needs to trust that cited resources remain in place.

Wynn, Wittenberg and Daan Broeder of CLARIN recently visited the CERN IT department to observe how the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE had approached security, monitoring and the provision of highly-available services.

“We are at the stage of designing the architecture,” says Broeden. “It is like a jigsaw puzzle: some pieces are already defined and in place. We are now looking for the missing pieces. To the extent we can we’d like to find preformed puzzle pieces that would be a good fit to save us from making and cutting our own.”

—Danielle Venton, EGEE

Just like you might have trouble navigating using this antique map, detector experiments can’t make sense of their data using an out-of-date map of their detector. Image courtesy Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center under Creative Commons license

The colossal particle detectors that monitor collisions at the Tevatron in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are unique beasts.

Scientists design most of the parts inside them to meet an individual set of specifications. But every once in a while, they find something the detectors can share.

Scientists at the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN are using a software system that Fermilab’s Computing Division originally designed for the CDF experiment at the Tevatron. The system, called Frontier, helps scientists distribute at lightning speed information needed to interpret collision data. The system is based upon the widely used Squid web cache technology.

“Since data is often shared between sites or pulled from a remote site, the speed of data return is critical,” said John DeStefano, an engineer at the RHIC and ATLAS Computing Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “Not even the fastest database servers can bridge the physical gap between geographically disparate sites. People noticed how efficiently Frontier worked for CMS, and so far there has been a notable benefit for ATLAS as well.”

Frontier caught on thanks to the interconnectedness of the particle physics community, said Fermilab engineer Liz Sexton-Kennedy. Many scientists now working on experiments at the LHC also worked on experiments at the Tevatron.

Fermilab computer scientists Jim Kowalkowski and Marc Paterno came up with the original idea for Frontier. A group of computer scientists at Fermilab who had previously gained experience with a similar system designed for the DZero experiment worked to implement the ideas at CDF. Another group from Johns Hopkins University contributed by testing the system.

A diagram of the Frontier architecture within CMS; to enlarge, please click on the image. Image courtesy Dave Dykstra, Fermilab

Adjusting for a changing frontier

Particle detectors like CDF, CMS and ATLAS are large, complex machines whose many parts move in amounts imperceptible to the eye but are critical to a scientist making precise measurements of particle tracks.

This makes reading data from inside a particle detector a bit like driving in a dream landscape whose features frequently shift. To navigate such an unpredictable setting, drivers continually need to swap out their maps for new, updated ones. In order to properly read data that detectors collect about an event, physicists need to know the lay of the land inside the detector at the time of collision.

What’s more, hundreds of thousands of computers around the world all need to pair that updated information with collision data as they analyze it, said Dave Dykstra, a Fermilab engineer who now heads the Frontier project.

“All of them need to load the data all at once,” he said. “It’s a big challenge.”

Scientists do not monitor the conditions of the detectors during each individual collision. In the CDF detector, beams of protons and antiprotons cross paths about 1.7 million times each second, each pass representing an opportunity for collisions. Scientists plan to cross beams of even more protons 3.1 million times per second in the CMS and ATLAS detectors once the LHC is up to full power.

Rather than try to keep up, scientists take new readings at frequent, regular intervals. A Frontier server takes information about the changing landscape of the detector from a database and sends it to other servers around the world, which then cache the information and share it with other, nearby computers. Only the Frontier server needs to request updated maps from the database.

The Frontier system uses HTTP, the same language Web sites use to communicate with Web browsers, to send database requests out to servers. HTTP is nimble enough to deliver information over long distances in multiple short bursts, and designed to handle huge numbers of users. Without Frontier, experiments would communicate through database queries better suited to a smaller number of local users.

Thanks to a recent upgrade by Dykstra, the system now saves even more time and computing power by skipping the step of reloading information if the detector maps have not changed. Frontier has earned its popularity, but like the computers it keeps supplied with new data, it must keep adapting to keep up with the changing landscape.

—Kathryn Grim, Fermilab