Language Matters: The European Research Infrastructure CLARIN, Today and Tomorrow

Abstract

CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure”. In 2012 CLARIN ERIC was established as a legal entity with the mission to create and maintain a digital infrastructure to support the sharing, use, and sustainability of language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form) available through repositories from all over Europe, in support of research in the humanities and social sciences and beyond. Since 2016 CLARIN has had the status of Landmark research infrastructure and currently it provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data and also offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse, or combine such datasets, wherever they are located. This is enabled through a networked federation of centres: language data repositories, service centres, and knowledge centres with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. In addition, CLARIN offers open access facilities for other interested communities of use, both inside and outside of academia. 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 operations at different levels of complexity. The strategic agenda adopted by CLARIN and the activities undertaken are rooted in a strong commitment to the Open Science paradigm and the FAIR data principles. This also enables CLARIN to express its added value for the European Research Area and to act as a key driver of innovation and contributor to the increasing number of industry programmes running on data-driven processes and the digitalization of society at large.