GOLD is an ontology

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

 for descriptive linguistics

Descriptive linguistics

In the study of language, description, or descriptive linguistics, is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community...

. It gives a formalized account of the most basic categories and relations used in the scientific description of human language.

GOLD was first introduced by Farrar and Langendoen (2003). Originally, it was envisioned as a solution to the problem of resolving disparate markup schemes for linguistic data, in particular data from endangered language

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

s. Meanwhile, GOLD is much more general and can be applied to all languages.

It is a work in progress, currently carried out by the LINGUIST List

Linguist List

The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia, and is used as a reference by the National Science Foundation in the United States...

, among others.