SharePoint brought in to rescue Aboriginal language

With some Australian Aboriginal languages facing extinction, the Arwarbukarl Cultural Resource Association (ACRA) has adopted Microsoft SharePoint and Access to help its work to preserve one indigenous dialect. Based on Access, ACRA has created its own program--Miromaa, which means "saved" in Awabakal--to store data and research on the Awabakal language. ACRA also is using SharePoint Server 2007 to share its work with other Aboriginal groups to help the spread and restoration of the language.

According to ACRA, the system can help archive "all evidences of language including, text, audio, images and video" as Word documents and spreadsheets. In the future, ACRA plans to make Miromaa available using a Web-based platform to enable other groups to contribute to its research and enable Aboriginal communities to use ACRA's work in their own language studies.

Jo Best of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

[alflanagan]

Wow

SharePoint and Access? Based on my experience with both, I suspect the language is doomed.

[devbost]

LOL

Point taken. But I read this and thought that these folks are putting the technology to better use than most. I'll be curious to see how they fare with this. Is the platform ready to act as a knowledge aggregator for something like this?

[DraconumPB]

Possibly...

...but hopefully not. These tools arn't impossible to use, but I'd say hardly ideal.

[Penguinisto]

LOL!

Well, that, or the aboriginal language doesn't have that many words in it...

(Access? Cripes - MSFT is getting CHEAP these days!)

/P

[rdupuy11]

yes doomed

Smaller languages are dying throughout the world...its not the usual cycle of languages either...mass consolidation to the percieved 'dominant language'....and no language is perceived as more dominant than our very own english.

There has been one example of a dead language being saved on a long term basis - hebrew.

I think its great they are documenting this language, but all the work on documentation, I highly suspect is being done in English...and as long as English is the language you need to do work in, then English is the dominant language...forget about it, the language is doomed.

Save it for a researcher to look at some day, but wait even a few more years, and no one will even care that its doomed.

[InformedComment]

Positive Outcomes..

Hi there,

As someone familiar with this project I know the facts. The not-for-profit was empowered to build a solution to a real world problem using software they could get started with - and then progressed to something that allowed them to take the solution more broadly.

The technology, and where it's going, how its supported, and how it can continue to be used by the people that are close to the real world problem is well established.

Cheap comments from uninformed readers does nothing to advance solutions to problems like this - but this software has enabled people to do something. (No, I am not from Microsoft).

Its also my guess you've never positively contributed to real problems like this. Try it some time.

[darynmck]

WOW alright

More than welcome to discuss at anytime, I can assure you that nothing is doomed unless we let it, and I for one will not let our languages dissappear.

[kojacked]

Because it works!

I know this might be a shock to some of you hear but could it be that they use SharePoint as their portal and document library because it's easy to use and administrate?!?!?!?

It amazes me how the haters here can barely put two words together here that make sense. Let me see if I can match the intelligence:

- phpBB is less than ideal.
- phpBB on Linux is far, far less than ideal.
- Gawd, you think if they were going to use phpBB for their portal they'd at least use mySQL!

Sorry on the last one; it doesn't make much sense since SharePoint needs MS SQL Server and phpBB can use Access, mySQL, MS SQL, etc. I'm sure that's what confused the simple mind of Penguinisto since he clearly has no idea what SharePoint is and just likes to bash Microsoft. Keep sharing your insights Penguinisto! You are obviously make the case FOR Microsoft! Look what happens to a guy who uses Linux too long...

Gotta go now; I just broke my phpBB site while trying to add a document library mod... I tried installing with EasyMod but its not supported for this mod. So I had to hack it in manually and screwed something up! Maybe it's because I'm so far behind in security updates... :( Gawd I wish I had SharePoint! Whaaaaaaaa!