Part 3
Projects & Landmarks
Social & Cultural Innovation / Landmark

CLARIN ERIC

Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure

A unique single sign-on access to all digital language resources and tools for Humanities and Social Sciences

description

The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) is a distributed RI that provides easy and sustainable access for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to digital language data − in written, spoken or multimodal form − and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine them, independent of their location. To this end CLARIN is building a networked federation of language data repositories, service centres and centres of expertise, with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. Tools and data from different centres are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform complex operations to support researchers in their work.

CLARIN became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in February 2012. Since then several countries have joined either as full Member, or as Observer. The ultimate goal is to include all EU and associated countries as well as third countries in or outside Europe.

activity

CLARIN distributed Research Infrastructure is made out of several types of centres. The operation, maintenance and continuous expansion of the infrastructure is carried out in the participating countries at the individual CLARIN centres – currently over 40, which have to meet clearly defined technical and organizational criteria, ensuring the coherence of the whole infrastructure. The backbone of CLARIN is provided by technical centres, in particular Service Providing Centres or CLARIN B-Centres, for short. These units, often a university or an academic institute, offer the scientific community access to resources, services and knowledge on a sustainable basis. Therefore, there are strict criteria to become a CLARIN B-Centre: it should be based on a stable technical and institutional foundation. The Assessment Committee checks these requirements during an assessment procedure, while the technical coordination among the centres takes place in the Centre Committee. Currently there are around 20 certified B-centres and several more centre candidates. This list is constantly growing as new members are joining CLARIN ERIC. Other centre types are: C-Centres – Metadata Providing Centres, their metadata are integrated with CLARIN but they need not to offer any further services; K-Centres – Knowledge Centres, part of the CLARIN Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure; T-Centres – Trust Centres, providing access to protected resources via the Service Provider Federation; E-Centres – External Centres offering central services without being part of any national consortium. Institutions in countries which are not part of CLARIN ERIC can become a CLARIN Centre of type C and K.

CLARIN also works closely together with research communities in creating and expanding a knowledge infrastructure that can support developers of language resources and tools, as well as the end-users of the available data and services. In total over 100 institutes across Europe are involved and more will be involved.

impact

CLARIN stimulates the reuse and repurposing of available research data, thereby enabling scholars in SSH – including digital humanities – to increase their productivity and, more importantly, open new research avenues in and across disciplines that address one or more of the multiple societal roles of language: as a carrier of cultural content and information, both synchronically and diachronically, as a reflection of scientific and societal knowledge, as an instrument for human communication, as one of the central components of the identity of individuals, groups, cultures or nations, as an instrument for human expression, or as an object of study or preservation. Through the access and discovery services,

CLARIN increases the potential impact of data and tools produced with publicly funded projects. Working with CLARIN data and tools will increase the skill levels for data analysis tasks among the new generations of SSH students, which is likely to be welcomed by the data science sector.

type
distributed
legal status
ERIC, 2012
political support
lead country
NL
members countries
AT, BG, CZ, DE, DK, EE, EL, FI, HR, HU, IT, LT, LV, NO, PL, PT, SE, SI
*observers
FR, UK
The full list of research institutions involved must be found in the website of the RI
timeline
Roadmap Entry
2006
Preparation Phase
2008-2011
Implementation/Construction Phase
2011-2015
Operation Start
2012
estimated costs
capital value
Not Available
design
Not Available
preparation
4 M€
construction
Not Available
operation
14 M€/year
headquarters

CLARIN ERIC
Utrecht, The Netherlands