ISO 24617-1:2009, ISO-TimeML is the International Organization for Standardization

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 ISO/TC37 standard for time and event markup and annotation. The scope is standardization of principles and methods relating to the annotation of temporal events in the contexts of electronic documentation and language.

Objectives of ISO-TimeML

The goals of ISO-TimeML are to provide a common model for the creation and use of temporal and event annotation, as a means of managing time-related data within documents, and to enable later categorization and data extraction with use of this meta-data.

History of ISO-TimeML

ISO-TimeML was presented to the ISO for consideration as a standard in August 2007. In this presentation, the preliminaries of ISO-TimeML were outlined, and potential applications were examined. In the following year, revisions were made to ISO-TimeML as the standard transitioned from a New Project (NP) to a Working Project (WP). The ISO-TimeML voting period began in October 2008 and was approved as an international standard by March 2009.

ISO-TimeML as one of the members of the ISO/TC37 family of standards

The ISO/TC37 standards are currently elaborated as high level specifications and deal with word segmentation (ISO 24614), annotations (ISO 24611 aka MAF, ISO 24612 aka LAF, ISO 24615 aka SynAF, and ISO 24617-1 aka SemAF/Time), feature structures (ISO 24610), multimedia containers (ISO 24616 aka MLIF), and lexicons (ISO 24613). These standards are based on low level specifications dedicated to constants, namely data categories (revision of ISO 12620

ISO 12620

ISO 12620 is a standard from ISO/TC 37 which defines a Data Category Registry, a registry for registering linguistic terms used in various fields of translation, computational linguistics and natural language processing and defining mappings both between different terms and the same terms used in...

), language codes (ISO 639

ISO 639

ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for language and language groups....

), scripts codes (ISO 15924

ISO 15924

ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems . Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one....

), country codes (ISO 3166

ISO 3166

ISO 3166 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization . It defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions . The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation...

) and Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 (ISO 10646).

The two level organization forms a coherent family of standards with the following common and simple rules:

• the high level specification provides structural elements that are adorned by the standardized constants;
• the low level specifications provide standardized constants as metadata.

Work group members

Joint work between ISO/TC 37/SC 4/WG 2 (TDG 3) and the TimeML
Working Group that was agreed on at the TDG 3 and LIRICS Working Group
Meeting, USC/ISI, Marina del Rey, CA, U.S.A., 2006-04-20/21/22.




Proposed Project Leaders and Editors:

• James Pustejovsky (editor)
• Kiyong Lee (co-editor)
• Harry Bunt
• Branmir Boguraev
• Nancy Ide

External links

• TimeML Specification Language
• Brandeis University Computer Science Department