The SALT project is an open-source project creating open standards. Some of the results of the SALT project have been turned into ISO standards or have been integrated into revised ISO standards, and ISO IPR policies apply to these. Control of TBX has been handed over from the SALT project (by the European Commission as its legal representative) to LISA (and its OSCAR Special Interest Group). All work carried out by the SALT project was explicitly royalty free and all IPR donations to the SALT project were made under a royalty free license arrangement. The directors of the SALT project hope that LISA continues this open policy in order to promote such standards.

may 27th 2003

This project responds to the fact that many organizations in the localization industry are now using both human translation enhanced by productivity tools and machine translation (MT) with or without human post-editing (Wright 1999a). This duality of translation modes brings with it the need to integrate existing resources in the form of (a) the natural language processing (NLP) lexicons used in machine translation (which we categorize as lexbases) and (b) the concept-oriented terminology databases used in human-translation productivity tools (which we call termbases). This integration facilitates consistency among various translation activities and lever-ages data from expensive information sources for both lex side and the term side of language processing. The title of the project can be distilled to the acronym SALT and reflects the intention to provide a Standards-based Access service to multilingual NLP-Lexicon and human-oriented Terminology resources via an Internet website.

The SALT project combines two recently finalized interchange formats: OLIF (Open Lexicon Interchange Format), which focuses on the interchange of data among lexbase resources from various machine translation systems, (Thurmaier et al. 1999), and MARTIF (ISO 12200:1999, MAchine-Readable Terminology Interchange Format), which facilitates the interchange of termbase resources with conceptual data models ranging from simple to sophisticated. The goal of SALT is to integrate lexbase and termbase resources into a new kind of database, a lex/term-base called XLT (eXchange format for Lex/Term-data). XLT is based on XML (Xtensible Markup Language), which is a data format for structured document interchange on the Web and is under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (XML 1999a).