Impressions from CLARIN Annual Meeting

Last week Prague hosted the second CLARIN Annual meeting since establishment of CLARIN ERIC (CLARIN = Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). The annual meeting collects together representatives from CLARIN centers from member countries and from countries interested in joining in near future, as well as others involved in one way or another. Altogether there were this year more than 100 registered participants. The Finnish community FIN-CLARIN was represented by a group of four participants.

The CLARIN ERIC, by the way, is only the second ERIC established, having received this status on 29th of February 2012.

Many plenary talks were given at the annual meeting describing the status of the CLARIN infrastructure from different angles: technical, integration, services, and organizational. Additionally the event included a number of showcases and demos/posters (in a so called points of pride session) giving an overview of new developments from around the CLARIN centers in different countries.  I liked this combination of different types of presentations as it gave good overview of the research infrastructure, both its many strong sides and also the challenges. Some of the presentation slides are available at the conference web site.

What I find attractive in the CLARIN ERIC approach to running a multi-national distributed research infrastructure is that there is plenty of freedom delegated on the national level, especailly in selecting which services and resources to provide for the European users. On the other hand the European level has put on place standards and has selected technologies that the national level outputs need to match. This seems like a good balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches.

In addition CLARIN has set up an assessment process that national centers need to pass in order to be accepted as official CLARIN Centers. The second assessment round is currently ongoing, and the third round is planned for spring 2014. Receiving the status of a CLARIN Center is naturally the ambition of the Language Bank of Finland as well - the Language Bank of Finland being the common name for Finnish CLARIN services. The third assessment round seems like a suitable target, although reaching the required level by spring takes some serious work. In any case, I announced Finland’s preliminary interest for this round in the combined Clarin Center Committee and Clarin Assessment Committee meeting.

It will be interesting to compare this event to the 2nd EUDAT Conference that I am attending this week. EUDAT is an EC funded project aiming to build a Pan-European collaborative data infrastructure. Most international research infrastructures require various services for management of research data (as well as other e-infrastructure services). CLARIN is actually one of the user communities participating to the EUDAT project. These two initiatives have common ground that they are approaching from different sides, and it takes plenty of communication to find the optimal interface.