NLP Interchange Format (NIF) 2.0 - Overview and Documentation

The NLP Interchange Format (NIF) is an RDF/OWL-based format that aims to achieve interoperability between Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, language resources and annotations. NIF consists of specifications, ontologies and software (overview), which are combined under the version identifier "NIF 2.0", but are versioned individually.

This document contains pointers to all the important resources relevant for the NLP Interchange Format (NIF), Version 2.0. Although the road to complete interoperability is still long, NIF is already successful in providing best practices and a solid foundation for the most frequent use cases. This foundation is created by:

Reusing existing standards such as RDF, OWL 2, the PROV Ontology, LAF (ISO 24612) and RFC 5147
Furthermore, NIF identifiers are used in the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0
All parts of NIF are royality-free and are published under an open license.
NIF comprises a set of RDF vocabularies and ontologies, which have stable identifiers, persistent hosting, an open license and a community approved meaning.
NIF publishes and maintains a set of specifications (NIF 2.0 Core Spec, Public Api Spec, Version Information ) with best practices, complementary implementations and examples on how to use the ontologies.
NIF is driven by its open and weclome-to-join community project NLP2RDF, consisting of a mailing list, a GitHub Project and a blog web site
NIF has received good uptake by industry, open-source projects and developers. We would like to thank all contributors in the attribution section

News

September 6th, 2013: Added resource list below.
July 7th, 2013: Initial draft of API parameters published.
July 7th, 2013: Initial draft of Versioning and License specifications published.
May 17, 2013: Integrating NLP using Linked Data. Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, and Martin Brümmer. accepted at ISWC 2013

About

What is NIF 2.0?

NIF 2.0 is a set of resources which constitute a major, not backward-compatible improvement upon the previous version NIF 1.0. Since NIF 2.0 is very diverse and it consists of specifications, ontologies, implementations and corpora. NIF is maintained by the NLP2RDF community project If you are interested in NLP2RDF, you can write emails to the nlp2rdf discussion list or sign up directly below:

E-mail address:
Name:

How to attribute NIF?

We try to maintain an up-to-date page with acknowledgements to the large community of contributors. If you refer to NIF in an academic context, please cite the recent paper published at the ISWC in Use track 2013:

Integrating NLP using Linked Data. Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, and Martin Brümmer. 12th International Semantic Web Conference, 21-25 October 2013, Sydney, Australia, (2013)

There is also a list of further NIF-related scientific publications.

Resource List

This part is automatically generated using JavaScript on the basis of https://github.com/NLP2RDF/ontologies/blob/master/dev/misc/resources.ttl.

Historic

NIF 1.0 Specification

A document specifying the deprecated NIF 1.0 specification. During NIF 1.0, we did not track revisions or versions. The old specification can be found here: http://nlp2rdf.org/nif-1-0