ABOUT

The CLARIN project is a large-scale pan-European collaborative effort to create, coordinate and make language resources and technology available and readily useable. CLARIN offers scholars the tools to allow computer-aided language processing, addressing one or more of the multiple roles language plays (i.e. carrier of cultural content and knowledge, instrument of communication, component of identity and object of study) in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

CLARIN is working on a general architecture to establish a research infrastructure. It is based on a layered setup with each layer offering web services. CLARIN will offer research community (1) web based applications (the infrastructure including new language resources will allow humanities researchers and in particular linguists to tackle the grand challenges of cross-cultural and cross-lingual work and to create a semantically rich domain; (2) semantic web services (powerful search engines, conversion and interoperability infrastructures); (3) grid integration services (domain wide identity for authentication purposes, exchange of user credentials for authorization purposes, navigating in a joint metadata domain) all these services will be connected to the GEANT backbone; (4) repositories & Centers (expertise centers that can help the different user communities)

COOPERATION

CLARIN is a pan-European community of institutions emerged from an open and bottom-up driven formation process. It is not exclusive and open for extensions. To become a member an institution has to support the CLARIN mission, has to have a strong national and international position to be able to contribute to the CLARIN mission and has to be represented by an expert who is known for his/her contributions to the field. The membership is expected to be active.

The CLARIN Consortium includes partners from 22 European countries, including Croatia. The CLARIN network has members in 32 EU countries, including Western Balkan countries such as Croatia and Serbia. Although the CLARIN research infrastructure specifically addresses the Social Sciences and Humanities research community a number of commercial companies have asked whether they could participate in collaborative initiatives. As one of CLARIN's leading principles is that all languages are equally important and that porting of knowledge and expertise between languages should be stimulated participation in CLARIN might give a significant boost a research on the field of linguistics and stimulate a development of new language research technologies.