This user guide serves as a compehensive overview on the CLARIN-D infrastructure. It describes prerequites for and methods of integrating linguistic tools and resources.
The user guide is on the highest level divided in two parts. The first part introduces basic concept and practices of the CLARIN-D infrastrucure at large. If you are new to CLARIN-D, you should read this part first. All types or resources to be integrated are affected by the policies which are outlined in this part of the user guide. Here, we cover the issues related to concepts and data categories, we introduce meta-data in general and the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) in particular, chapter 4 deals with (mainly linguistic) annotation of primary data, chapter 5 introduces issues of quality and chapter 6 serves as a short introduction on accesibility of resources and rights management.
The second part covers issues which are specific to particular types of resources (e.g. corpora, lexical resources) or to particular tools (e.g. taggers, parsers). It also presents the CLARIN-D way of orchestrating tools in tool chains.
CLARIN-D is an evolving project and the descriptions provided in this user guide cannot be considered as definite and unchangeeable. Research requirements as well as new technical developments may well call for new stadndards and practices and of changes in existing ones. We therefore consider this document to be a living on which will be subject to changes in the future. You will find this document as an electonic one with a version number attached to it. A version tracker will keep you up-to date on latest changes to this document.
Each section of this user guide is concluded by a list of recommendations that briefly summarize the current technical prerequisites for tool and resource integration with respect to the publication date of the user guide.
A central glossary for CLARIN spefic terms has been collected on the CLARIN EU website and provides pointers to most of the technologies that are mentioned throughout this user guide.