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The role of Parthenosfor CLARIN ERIC

Steven KrauwerCLARIN ERIC Executive Director

Overview

• CLARIN in a nutshell• Our infrastructure• What we offer to our users• Our audience(s)• Our expectations from Parthenos

The basic ideaCLARIN: The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (http://www.clarin.eu) European federation of digital repositories with language

data and tools (text, speech, multimodal, gesture …) with access to interoperable language and speech

technology tools through web services to retrieve, manipulate, enhance, explore and exploit data

with uniform single sign-on access to archives and tools with access restrictions

target audience humanities and social sciences scholars to cover all EU and associated countries and all languages relevant for target audience

Infrastructure foundations

• Distributed architecture: (http-accessible) files, web applications and web services spread all over Europe

• Some of them password-protected (licenses, privacy, …)

• Complete and flexible metadata ecosystem:– Based on metadata components (building

blocks, 1000+) and profiles (ready to use templates, 170+)

– Includes semantic definitions by linking to definitions (3000+) in the CLARIN Concept Registry

– Complete conversion workflows available:• import from the most widely used metadata schemas

(Dublin Core, MODS, …)• export to Linked Open Data

Infrastructure foundations

• Service Provider Federation: unique organisational and technical setup to reach all EU academic users– currently connected to about 600 academic

organisations in 9 countries (CZ, NL, DE, BE, AT, NO, FI, SE, DK) … and more are being added

– delivers access where eduGAIN does not

• Seamless integration based on the Centre Registry

• 24/7 monitoring of 87 distributed services at 44 hosts

• Metadata harvesting & indexation at the VLO (rich metadata for 750.000+ records, from 60+ sources)

• Federated Content Search (115 collections from 11 centres, representing 60 languages)

The 28 CLARIN centres

What the user sees: It offers single sign-on access to all resources It makes it possible for the researcher to find resources (metadata search), and to refer to them in a persistent way (persistent identifiers)

It allows for content search in and across collections

It offers access to web services and workflows to perform complex linguistic & content operations and visualisations

It covers both historical and contemporary language material in all modalities (text, audio, video, etc)

It serves both expert and non-expert users It offers access to depositing and long term preservation services

It offers access to knowledge and expertise

Who are our users?

• Our focus is on language• Language is everywhere and plays

many different roles

The roles of language

• Carrier of cultural content• Record of the past• Main communication instrument within and across

societies• Preserving and disseminating our knowledge• Instrument to formulate rules for society• Carrier of information• Means of human expression• Focus of cognitive processes• Component of national or cultural identity• Object of study• Object of computer processing

The roles of language andcorresponding audiences• Carrier of cultural content: cultural heritage

• Record of the past: history• Main communication instrument within and across

societies: sociology, anthropology• Preserving and disseminating our knowledge: all

disciplines• Instrument to formulate rules for society: law,

theology• Carrier of information: media studies, journalism• Means of human expression: literary studies,

psychology• Focus of cognitive processes: brain studies,

psychology• Component of national or cultural identity: political

sciences• Object of study: linguistics• Object of computer processing: language and speech

technology

Our expectations fromParthenos

• Current landscape fragmented, but blooming with many RI initiatives in different stages of maturity and covering different disciplines

• Unique opportunity to build knowledge and technological bridges in order to– Avoid re-invention of wheels and learn from each

other’s successes and failures– Link up existing and emerging infrastructures in

order to provide more and better services to more users

– Get better insight in user requirements from different and new communities

– Facilitate cross-discipline research