ISO/TC 37/SC 4 is a subcommittee of the technical committee (TC) 37 within the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and works on language resource management. The goal of ISO/TC 37/SC 4 is to develop various international standards, guidelines and methods for effectively creating, coding, processing and managing mono- and multilingual language resources in various domains, such as written and speech corpora, lexical databases, dictionary compiling and classification schemes.

The development and widespread use of standards become more and more important, because the need for reusable and interoperable linguistic resources has grown continuously during the last years. The standardised linguistic resources can be applied in a platform- independent manner to different purposes and areas of linguistics, not only in academic community, but also in the industry ( for example for data modelling, exchange of information between NLP modules in multi-lingual information retrieval, across cultural technical communication and information management). The spectrum for the application area is very wide.

The national standardization will allow that, once created, linguistic resources can be used in various ways many times in different applications and research areas with little and low time-consuming effort.

The working area of the subcommittee ISO/TC 37/SC 4 includes:

• Developing standards, guidelines and other related documents to maximize the applicability of language resources
• Developing principles and methods for creating, coding, processing and managing language resources
• Developing representation formats for different kinds of linguistic information
• Defining abstract models and general frameworks for creation and representation of language resources
• Developing the optimal solution for different fields of application
• Etc.