The BMBF funded project CLARIN-D will develop a digital infrastructure for language-centered research in the humanities and social sciences. The main function of the CLARIN-D service centres will be to provide relevant, useful data and tools in an integrated, interoperable and scalable way. CLARIN-D will roll this infrastructure out in close collaboration with expert scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to ensure that it meets the needs of users in a systematic and easily accessible way.
CLARIN-D is building on the achievements of the preparatory phase of the European CLARIN initiative as well as CLARIN-D's Germany-specific predecessor project D-SPIN. These previous projects have developed standards to be met by the CLARIN-D services centres, technical standards and solutions for key functions, a set of requirements which participants have to provide, as well as plans for the sustainable provision of tools and data and their long-term archiving.
The outcomes of these projects which are relevant and accessible to the user of the CLARIN-D infrastructure are:
WebLicht, an environment for the orchestration of linguistic tools and the sequential annotation of primary data. If you want to learn more about Weblicht, please consult the section called “WebLicht – A service-oriented architecture for linguistic resources and tools” or log in to WebLicht directly if you signed up for an account.
The resource inventory of the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO). You can use the VLO to browse and search through many language resources and check their availibility and other metadata.
The CLARIN-D helpdesks. We will refer you to these helpdesks for topics and issues which are too specific for this general user guide. There are always questions which will remain open. If you have one, please do not hesitate to contact the most appropriate helpdesk.
One of the major tasks of CLARIN-D will be the maintainance and hosting of resources and tools, ours as well as yours. Indeed, the backbone of the CLARIN-D infrastructure is a network of resource centres which offer services to this end (e.g. repostories and persistent identifiers for resources and tools, expertise in language technology standards and questions regarding interoperability. If you want to contribute to CLARIN-D with your resource(s) and/or tool(s), it is a good idea to get in touch with the CLARIN-D center which ist nearest to your site. You will find a list of CLARIN-D service centres on the CLARIN-D website.
If you want to become an active part of the wider CLARIN-D community because you feel that language resource and tools is something which is or could be relevant for your research, you might consider joining one of the discipline-specific working groups (“Facharbeitsgruppen”, F-AG). You are always welcome to join in.
CLARIN-D and the European CLARIN consortium also organize regular tutorials and workshops that allow you to learn more about the CLARIN-D infrastructure and to get hands-on training using it.