LaCAS has published its progress report

LaCAS (Open Archive in Language and Cultural Area Studies) initially aimed to address three challenges for Inalco: the lack of an overall vision of research on linguistic, cultural and geopolitical areas, the low profile of its scientific heritage, and the lack of a platform to share this knowledge.

Le bilan

This 40-page document provides an overview of the project's history, technical developments, most recent achievements and services. It also details the project's governance within Inalco, its partnerships, and the professions and skills of the LaCAS team. It also highlights its future prospects.

It thus offers a clear and detailed vision of the operation of the LaCAS platform, an innovative technological infrastructure designed to meet the challenges of valorizing areal studies and open science.

Among the achievements offered to the scientific community and the general public are the platform's two main interfaces:

• LaCAS data for structuring research data
• LaCAS publications to editorialize them in the form of thematic dossiers

The tools created and services offered include:

• the Thésaurus LaCAS, which processes, organizes and structures the vocabulary of areal studies;
• the Annuaire des études aréales, which offers entries dedicated to researchers, projects and research teams;
• media for promoting and disseminating knowledge, including:
  • audiovisual programs to promote the careers and research of specialists in a given cultural area: Illustration and audiovisual documentation of areal studies (I-DEA); Portraits of areal studies researchers (PEA). Around 200 researchers from all disciplines, affiliated with Inalco and other institutions, were interviewed between 2021 and 2024.
  • the Hypothesis notebook to inform the scientific community of the project's achievements and developments
  • the Lettre(s) de LaCAS to promote the platform's contents
  • a printed brochure.

In five years, LaCAS has developed an open knowledge base comprising 7,000 concepts, 160,000 resources and 60,000 indexed data, accessible via the LaCAS data and LaCAS publications interfaces.

Document produced on the initiative and under the direction of Evane Grossemy, communications officer for the LaCAS project and coordinated by Bastien Sepúlveda, digital humanities officer at Inalco, with the participation of Assen Slim, vice-president research at Inalco and Peter Stockinger, scientific director of the LaCAS project.

The outlook with LaCAS-IA

This review is published at a pivotal moment for the LaCAS project. While the project has just been awarded the Open Science Award for Research Data by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), the funding that enabled its development is coming to an end, leading to a restructuring of the project.

However, in 2025, new funding from the Ile-de-France region will enable the development of LaCAS-IA, integrating in an even more sustained way the use of artificial intelligence in the processing of resources resulting from open science tools, from their indexing to their editorialization.