CLARIN

CLARIN is a research infrastructure that was initiated from the vision that all digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond are accessible through a single sign-on online environment for the support of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. CLARIN offers long-term solutions and technology services for deploying, connecting, analysing and sustaining digital language data and tools. CLARIN supports scholars who want to engage in data-driven research, contributing to a multilingual European Research Area.[3]

CLARIN offers a wide range of services,[4] some of which are integrated in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).[5]

The main services offered to the research community by CLARIN are listed below:

• Virtual Language Observatory (VLO);[6] an easy to use search and discovery interface for a large number of resources from a wide variety of disciplinary domains and for many languages.
• The Language Resource Switchboard;[7] a tool that helps you to find a matching language processing web application for your data.
• Depositing Services;[8] to help researchers to store their resources in a sustainable and persistent way. Many of CLARIN centres offer a depositing service. They are willing to store the resources in their repository and assist with technical and organizational details.

The majority of operations, services and centres of the CLARIN infrastructure is provided and funded by the CLARIN ERIC membership (member, observers and linked third parties). Members and observers can be countries or intergovernmental organizations. They set up a national consortium, typically consisting of universities, research institutions, libraries and public archives, of which at least one has the status of CLARIN centre (see overview of CLARIN centres[9]). The contribution expected from the membership is to create and provide access to digital language data collections, digital tools and expertise for researchers to work with the resources.

Below is the list of current CLARIN ERIC members,[10] observers and third parties:

CLARIN's governance and coordination body is an ERIC,[11] that is, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium.[12] CLARIN ERICs members are governments or intergovernmental organizations.

CLARIN is one of the Research Infrastructures that were selected for the European Research Infrastructures Roadmap by ESFRI,[13] the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. In the 2016 ESFRI Roadmap CLARIN was listed as Landmark.

The General Assembly[14] represents the members of CLARIN ERIC and is the highest decision-making body of CLARIN ERIC. It is assisted by an international Scientific Advisory Board.[15] The day-to-day management is in the hands of the Board of Directors[16] chaired by the Executive Director Prof. Franciska de Jong[17] and supported by the CLARIN Office.[18]

The largest effort towards the further integration of data, tools and expertise stems from the activities in the national consortia. The National Coordinators’ Forum is responsible for the coordination of the collaboration across countries. Various committees and working groups, as well as regular workshops and conferences bring together experts from the CLARIN community to discuss and solve problems of common interest.

One of the missions of the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure is to ensure that the knowledge and expertise available throughout the CLARIN infrastructure is accessible in an organized way, easy to navigate for the CLARIN community and for the Social Sciences and Humanities research community at large. A cornerstone of the CLARIN knowledge sharing ecosystem are the Knowledge Centres,[19] institutions with expertise in one or more aspects of the domain covered by the CLARIN community.

Tour de CLARIN[20] is an initiative that reinforces the knowledge sharing agenda by periodically highlighting prominent activities of a particular CLARIN national consortium or Knowledge Centres targeting specific communities of use. Tour de CLARIN enhances the visibility of the national consortia and Knowledge Centres and reveals the richness of the CLARIN landscape.