Researchers from all disciplines of the humanities will find help and guidance for resource and tool integration. The user guide introduces and motivates the CLARIN-D policy towards these issues. It also provides pointers to existing documentation of common practice in the field.
The procedures described in this user guide also provide developers with methods and metrics to evaluate linguistic tools and resources from a purely technical point of view. Evaluation from a developer's perspective tries to answer the question how difficult or expensive it is to integrate external resources into the CLARIN-D infrastructure. For resources that are developed from scratch this part will also serve as a guideline for minimizing the costs for adaptation and finally integration into the CLARIN-D infrastructure. A major aim of this user guide will be in particular to support developers in achieving interoperability with data formats that are endorsed by CLARIN-D. Besides the two intended audiences sketched above, the editors hope that this user guide might also be of value for researchers external to the national CLARIN consortia, e.g. for funding bodies and their reviewers.