The Role of Language Evolution in Digital Archives

Paper in proceeding, 2013

With advancements in technology and culture, our language changes. We invent new words, add or change meanings of existing words and change names of existing things. Left untackled, these changes in language create a gap between the language known by users and the language stored in our digital archives. In particular, they affect our possibility to firstly find and content and secondly interpret that content. In this paper we discuss the limitations brought on by language evolution and existing methodology for automatically finding evolution. We discuss measured needed in the near future to ensure semantically accessible digital archives for long-term preservation.