CLARIN-NL is a large national project in the Netherlands which aims to play a central role in the Europe-wide CLARIN infrastructure.
The pan-European CLARIN project is a huge collaborative coordination effort to create make language resources and technology. Furthermore, these new, and also existing, resources will be made readily usable. CLARIN will offer scholars the tools to allow computer-aided language processing to address one or more of the multiple roles language plays in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Examples of these roles are "carrier of cultural content and knowledge", "instrument of communication", "a component of identity", and "an object of study".
Key Points
The CLARIN initiative offers:
- Comprehensive service to the humanities disciplines with respect to language resources and technology.
- Technology overcoming the many boundaries currently fragmenting the resources and tools landscape (institutional, structural and semantic interoperability problems).
- Tools and resources that will be interoperable across languages and domains, thus preserving and supporting the multilingual and multicultural European heritage.
- Comprehensive training and education programs including university education in the different member states.
- Improvement and extension of web-based collaborations, i.e. creating virtual working groups breaking the discipline boundaries.
- Development or improvement of standards for language resource maintenance.
- A persistent and stable infrastructure that researchers will be able to rely on for decades.
Key Technologies
To achieve these challenging goals CLARIN will be built on, and contribute to, a number of key technologies from the major initiatives advancing the eScience paradigm:
- Data Grid technology to connect the repositories as being implemented in the DAM-LR pilot project and web services that the various centres provide;
- Ideas launched by the Digital Library community to create Live Archives;
- Semantic Web technology to overcome the structural and semantic encoding problems;
- Multi-lingual language processing technology that supports cultural and linguistic integration.
The Dutch program, CLARIN-NL, offers scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences the tools for computer-aided language processing.
CLARIN-NL aims to design, construct, validate, and exploit a research infrastructure in the Netherlands that is needed to provide a sustainable and persistent eScience working environment for researchers in the Humanities, and, in particular, in Linguistics, who want to make use of language resources and the technology to use these resources for their research.