The Tools group is charged with identifying and documenting existing and needed tools which will be the face of the cyberinfrastructure for ordinary working linguists. These tools include both those used by data creators (e.g., linguists annotating data that they later share) and data consumers (e.g., linguists using the annotated data of others to create new kinds of data).

Existing Tools

• TypeCraft Collaborative text annotation
• WALS The World Atlas of Language Structures Online
• ODIN Online Database of INterlinear glossed text
  

• TextGrid "TextGrid aims to create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts. It thus forms a cornerstone in the emerging e-Humanities."

• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) "Open source Python modules, linguistic data and documentation for research and development in natural language processing, supporting dozens of NLP tasks, with distributions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux."
• eHumanities Desktop (project is in alpha development stage, no description available yet)
• Roma: TEI validation tool "These pages will help you design your own TEI validator, as a DTD, RELAXNG or W3C Schema."

Needed Tools

• ??
  

What's a killer application?

Google Maps may be a good example for a killer app:

• it's killer in the way it brought mapping data to everyone.
• it actually killed, e.g. gml - at least gml's hope for mass adoption.
• it didn't piggyback on a standard, but set one: kml - and it turned out, creating xml files isn't that much of a problem, if you want it badly enough.

But

• can there be someting like micro-killer-apps?
• can there be something like scientific killer apps? doesn't "scientific" mean "too small to be killer"?

Following the Google Maps example a killer app would help pull data out of the drawers. This might happen in two ways:

1. Make publishing data easier or
2. provide big enough incentives to submit to tedious publishing.

What could killer apps for linguistics look like?

• search engines?
• data visualization?
• can "archiving" or "longterm preservation" be a killer app? (Does not sound like it - does it.)sss
  
• is reproducible research enough of an incentive to publish data?

may the killer app be something social/political - like a new model for scientific recognition on the web? and if so, what can we do to bring it about? Foster skills?

Killer applications are applications that are used lots and lots

Therefore a good question might be: Who are the linguists interested in finding and/or producing reusable data?

* computational linguists (yes)
* corpus linguists (may be)
* typologists (may be)
* descriptive linguists ( perhaps ...)
* theoretical linguists (hm... )

But data for the computational linguist is probably not quite the same as data for the typologist, and
where do theoretical linguists stand when it comes to 'data' ?
Likewise a killer app for a computational linguist is probably something very different from an application that a
descriptive linguist, engaged into field work, would care to call a useful tool. Theoretical linguists on the other hand would probably
not like to spend much time on finding data.
Finally the generation of reusable resources, if considered important at all, must pay off academically to attract more than the occasional linguist.
Perhaps we can conclude from this that we rather need a cluster of tools than this one application - together they might be a killer. :)

So following the definition above ("killer apps are apps that are used a lot"), we can probably assume that future killer apps will be on the web.