CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is a digital infrastructure offering data, tools and services to support research based on language resources. This infrastructure was developed from the vision that all digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond are accessible through an online environment for the support of researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
Social Sciences & Humanities
Supporting Language as Social and Cultural data with CLARIN ERIC
The Challenge
CLARIN provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form) for scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and beyond, and advanced solutions 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.
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 complex operations to support researchers in their work. The challenge, however, lies in making this complex infrastructure to properly work.
The Solution
The collaboration framework
The collaboration with CLARIN ERIC started back in 2018 with the EOSC-hub project. During the project, CLARIN ERIC was selected to vertically integrate the CLARIN ERIC services in EOSC as a way to stimulate the discoverability of data sets, making the citation of these more convenient and to take away the barriers to automated processing of data.
Technical support from EGI
Through the EOSC-hub CLARIN Thematic Service, EGI delivered expertise and support on a variety of technical areas including platform development, data migration, and training on the EGI advanced services. The cloud-based resources provided from datacenters belonging to the EGI Federation have been used to:
- Deploy a development instance of the Language Resource Switchboard (LRS) together with nextcloud instance to test the LRS plugin.
- Testing the installation of the ElasticSearch and the monitoring based on Kibana
Over the years, the collaboration between EGI and CLARIN ERIC has been further extended. EGI has continued to provide technical support and access to the EGI resources.
The agreement signed with EGI provides us with the opportunity to evaluate a new resource provider and will bring us more experience with the EGI ecosystem. The resources provided under this agreement will enable us to test-drive a redundant setup of the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) with the goal of increasing the reliability of the service provided to the CLARIN community and offered within the EOSC-hub marketplace.
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