Subprojects

CLARIN-NL has started up a wide range of subprojects. These projects serve in part as showcases for participating humanities scholars/institutes and they serve as a kind of guideline for non-participating scholars: look what is possible!

There are various types of subprojects

Demonstrator and Resource Curation projects.

First, there are subprojects focusing on the data and tools the humanities researchers want to integrate in the CLARIN infrastructure. In such projects a humanities researcher usually works together with experts from a CLARIN centre and technical experts for relevant software. These subprojects are usually initiated by submissions to calls for such projects issued by CLARIN-NL (Four such calls have been issued). These subprojects come in two varieties: demonstrator and resource curation projects.

• Demonstrator projects are projects that demonstrate the potential of software, in particular Human Language Technology, for the humanities. They do so by making a concrete application accompanied by a demonstration scenario to show how the application can be used for humanities research.
• Resource Curation projects are projects that curate existing resources to make them CLARIN-compatible, which includes converting the resource to a standard format supported by CLARIN, adding (or converting) metadata in a CLARIN-compatible way, ensuring semantic interoperability, and ensuring that the resource is visible in and accessible from the CLARIN infrastructure.

CLARIN-NL additionally supports some independently financed projects to make sure that the data and tools produced in the project are made CLARIN-compatible and to profit from the interesting demonstrators produced by these projects.

All these subprojects are supported in various ways, e.g. by the CLARIN-NL Helpdesk,  specific support for semantic interoperability by the ISOCAT Coordinator (Ineke Schuurman), and support for CLAM, software to facilitate turning existing tools into RESTful web services by Maarten van Gompel.  

CLARIN-infrastructure-projects

CLARIN infrastructure subprojects are technical subprojects focusing on the implementation basic functionality of the CLARIN-infrastructure. These are usually carried out by experts of the various CLARIN-centres.

CLARIN-NL cooperates with CLARIN Flanders in a cooperation project. The overall project consists of several parts, both on the Flanders side and on the Netherlands part, but the most prominent cooperation takes place in the TTNWW project. This project aims to enable to combined use of web services for all kinds of HTL tools in a work flow system.

Centres of Expertise

CLARIN-NL has set up two (virtual) centres of expertise. Centres of expertise foster and further elaborate expertise that is considered important for the CLARIN infrastructure.

The virtual Centre of Expertise on the curation of data, led by the Radboud University of Nijmegen but with close involvement of experts from the CLARIN Centres, has run since the end of 2011 and is planned to run until the end of 2013. An actual overview of the data curation results and plans can be found on the Data Curation section on the CLARIN-NL website. A guideline for the curation of data has been created, so that other projects can benefit from this. This guideline is available here.

Early in 2012 it was decided to consider Nederlab as the second (virtual) CLARIN-NL Centre of Expertise, more specifically on data and tools for the study of the Dutch language and culture across time. The major activities of Nederlab for CLARIN-NL, which are coordinated by Meertens Institute, will take place in 2014.