The Maintenance Agency of ISO 639, an international body responsible for standardizing language codes, recently elected Laurent Romary, a DARIAH representative, as its chairman.
ISO 639 is responsible for curating two- and three-letter codes used to identify languages and language groups. These codes are crucial for computer applications globally, particularly those dealing with textual or oral content in multiple languages. They serve as a fundamental standard and are systematically integrated into various platforms, including all web pages worldwide.
“ISO 639 plays an essential role in digital scholarship as a basic building block of some of the core standards in digital humanities, including the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines,” said Laurent Romary. “I feel honored by the opportunity to bring DARIAH expertise to such an important international endeavor.”
Romary is Director of Culture and Scientific Information at Inria and was the founder and the first director of DARIAH. During his years of research in computational linguistics and digital humanities, he developed a strong interest in the standardization and sharing of open linguistic data, and identified the need to implement shared infrastructures in the service of open science.
Romary’s appointment is expected to further enhance the collaboration and expertise within ISO 639, benefiting digital scholarship and language technologies worldwide. His extensive experience and dedication to advancing international standards position him well to lead the agency in its mission to maintain and evolve essential linguistic codes for the digital age.
