Overview

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. These documents describe the upcoming NIF 2.1 release, currently under revision by the broader community.

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 and LAF (ISO 24612)
  • Utilisation of NIF identifiers in the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 2.0
  • Royality-free publishing of all parts of NIF 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 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.

Contents: