survey of liaisons with other european ... - · this document presents an overview of liaison...

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Survey of liaisons with other

European projects and initiatives

2009-02-23

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EC FP7 project no. FP7-RI-2122230

Deliverable: D5C-1 - Deadline: 31.12. 2008 (postponed to 01.04.2009 due to late start)

Responsible: Erhard Hinrichs

C

© all rights reserved by University Tübingen on behalf of CLARIN

Editors: Erhard Hinrichs and Lothar Lemnitzer

Contributors: Antti Arppe, Bente Maegaard, Steven Krauwer, Dieter van Uytvanck, Tamás Váradi, Peter Wittenburg and Martin Wynne

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SUMMARY......................................................................................................................................................................... 4

1 BACKGROUND .............................................................................................................................................................. 5

2 LIAISON WITH PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES..................................................................................................... 7

2.1 PROJECTS INITIATIVES WHICH PROVIDE SERVICES.......................................................................................................7 2.1.1 TERENA ............................................................................................................................................................. 7 2.1.2 APA .................................................................................................................................................................... 7 2.1.3 DEISA................................................................................................................................................................. 8 2.1.4 DELOS ............................................................................................................................................................... 9 2.1.5 DRIVER.............................................................................................................................................................. 9

2.2 POLICY MAKING INITIATIVES ....................................................................................................................................11 2.2.1 Infrastructure Reflections Group ..................................................................................................................... 11 2.2.2 FlareNet ........................................................................................................................................................... 11 2.2.3 HERA................................................................................................................................................................ 12

2.3 PROJECTS / INITIATIVES WHICH ESTABLISH RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE.................................................................13 2.3.1 DARIAH ........................................................................................................................................................... 13 2.3.2 Bamboo ............................................................................................................................................................ 13 2.3.3 CESSDA ........................................................................................................................................................... 14 2.3.4 ESFRI/SSH Group............................................................................................................................................ 14 2.3.5. ESFRI-PP Group............................................................................................................................................. 15

2.4 PROJECTS / INITIATIVES IN THE FIELD OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND TOOLS..........................................................16 2.4.1 Medar ............................................................................................................................................................... 16 2.4.2 ADHO............................................................................................................................................................... 16 2.4.3 ELRA / ELDA ................................................................................................................................................... 17 2.4.4. ESF Eurobabel ................................................................................................................................................ 17

2.5 PROJECTS / INITIATIVES WHICH BUILD AND PROVIDE FRAMEWORKS.........................................................................18 2.5.1 ISO ................................................................................................................................................................... 18 2.5.2 TEI.................................................................................................................................................................... 18

3 CONFERENCES AND OTHER EVENTS ................................................................................................................. 20

3.1 LREC 2008...............................................................................................................................................................20 3.2 INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS CONFERENCE (IIS 2008),..............................................................................21 3.3 DIGITAL HUMANITIES CONFERENCE 2008 ................................................................................................................21 3.4 ESF WORKSHOP "CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN SCHOLARSHIP IN THE HUMANITIES" ....................................21 3.5 EUROPEAN RESEARCHERS' NIGHT: DIGITAL HUMANITIES ........................................................................................21 3.6 HERA 4TH ANNUAL MEETING .................................................................................................................................21 3.7 MPG E-SCIENCE SEMINAR ON METADATA INFRASTRUCTURES................................................................................22 3.8 BUILDING COMMUNITIES IN THE DIGITAL ARTS AND HUMANITIES ..........................................................................22 3.9 EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURES....................................................................................22 3.10 4TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ESCIENCE 2008.................................................................................22 3.11 BUILDING A V IRTUAL HUMANITIES COLLABORATORY...........................................................................................23 3.12 DIGITAL PRESERVATION WORKSHOP......................................................................................................................23 3.13 ESFRI PP WORKSHOPS IN BRUSSELS.....................................................................................................................24 3.14 LATECH AT EACL 2009 .........................................................................................................................................24 LITERATURE ...................................................................................................................................................................24

Summary The ultimate objective of CLARIN is to create a European federation of existing digital repositories that include language-based data, to provide uniform access to the data, wherever it is, and to provide existing language and speech technology tools as web services to retrieve, manipulate, enhance, explore and exploit the data. The primary target audience is researchers in the humanities and social sciences and the aim is to cover all languages relevant for the user community. The objective of the current CLARIN Preparatory Phase Project (2008-2010) is to lay the technical, linguistic and organizational foundations, to provide and validate specifications for all aspects of the infrastructure (including standards, usage, IPR) and to secure sustainable support from the funding bodies in the (now 23) participating countries for the subsequent construction and exploitation phases beyond 2010.

This document presents an overview of liaison activities with other European projects and initiatives. Liaison and networking activities are an essential part of an infrastructural project like CLARIN. The activities are ongoing, therefore this report provides a snapshot of these activities.

The relevant European projects and initiatives can be classified in the following ways with regard to the CLARIN perspective: a) projects which provide services which are interesting or necessary for CLARIN to draw on. From the perspective of these projects, CLARIN can be viewed as a user of these services; b) projects which work on a strategic level, defining policies on the relevant sectors: c) projects and initiatives which also aim at building research infrastructures, but with another subject and / or target group; d) projects which address the same subject and / or target group but do not necessarily have the aim of establishing a research infrastructure; e) initiatives which provide frameworks like standards.

With projects of type (a) it is useful to come to stable agreement about the usage of services. CLARIN profits from the services offered while we hope that these projects and initiatives view CLARIN as an interesting use case. In relation to projects and initiatives of type (b) it is necessary to raise our voice and to articulate the interests of our target communities; with projects and initiatives of type (c) it is most useful to find common solutions to common problems, to avoid the doubling of efforts and the implementation of solution which are not compatible with one another; projects and initiatives of type (d) should be seen as possible allies in addressing the target groups for the use of the CLARIN infrastructure; CLARIN might also be able to offer services to these projects; for initiatives of type (e), CLARIN will on the one hand adapt the existing and emerging frameworks and on the other hand participate and express requirements which arise the process of the building of the infrastructure.

This report also lists CLARIN participation in conferences and other outside events. While this is normally considered to be part of the dissemination activities, in this early stage of the projects our participation in these events also contributes to our networking activities.

1 Background Liaison and networking activities are an essential part of an infrastructural project like CLARIN. The activities are ongoing; therefore this report provides a snapshot of these activities. They are an essential part for the following reasons:

a) CLARIN cannot solve or even tackle every problem on the way of building the infrastructure without strong allies;

b) CLARIN and other research infrastructure projects face the same problems and, for reasons of compatibility, should look for common solutions to these problems;

c) CLARIN and other research infrastructure projects will in some cases address the same target groups. Research on migration processes might be a good example. This kind of research has to cross the boundaries of disciplines. It will be necessary to consult statistical figures provided by social science infrastructures to understand the macro-processes of migration as well as linguistic expressions of migrants, available as language data, to understand the self-perception of groups of immigrants as well as the expressed attitude of other groups towards immigrants. In the long run, the research infrastructures have to be permeable to a point where it does not matter for the researcher which infrastructure he / she is referring to. Virtual data collection, for example, might span several infrastructures.

The relevant European projects and initiatives can be classified in the following ways with regard to the CLARIN perspective:

a) projects which provide services which are interesting or necessary for CLARIN to draw on. From the perspective of these projects, CLARIN can be viewed as a user of these services. A good example of this type is the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA; see below and the article by Peter Wittenburg et al in the CLARIN Newsletter #2);

b) projects and initiatives which work on a strategic level, defining policies in the field of European-level research and service infrastructures and inform the European decision makers and stakeholders in this field; examples which is important for CLARIN are the FlareNet project and the e-IRG group;

c) projects and initiatives which also aim at building research infrastructures, but with another subject and / or target group; a good example for this type the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA);

d) projects which address the same subject and / or target group but do not necessarily have the aim of establishing a research infrastructure; CLARIN might also be able to offer services to these projects; examples of this type ELRA and its distribution agency ELDA;

e) initiatives which provide frameworks like standards; a good example of this type is the ISO TC 37/SC4 committee.

With projects of type (a) it is useful, from the CLARIN perspective, to come to stable agreement about the usage of services. CLARIN profits from the services offered while we hope that these projects and initiatives view CLARIN as an interesting use case. With projects of type (b) it is necessary to raise or voice and to articulate the interests of our target communities with regard to the language resource infrastructure. With projects and initiatives of type (c) we should discuss common solutions to common problems, to avoid the doubling of efforts and the implementation of solution which are not compatible with one another.

Projects and initiatives of type (d) should be seen as allies in addressing target groups for the use of the CLARIN infrastructure. For initiatives of type (e), CLARIN will on the one hand adapt the existing standards and emerging frameworks and on the other hand participate and express requirements which arise in the process of building the infrastructure.

In the following section, the liaison activities and there outcome and future plans are described in a structured form. This report is based on an online survey form which can be consulted at: http://www.clarin.eu/node/1110.

For each activity, the following questions will be answered:

• details about the arrangements with the contact person(s), incl. details about the person,

• details about the project or initiative (Name(s); URL of webpage; coordinator and other key partners relevant for our project; scientific, research and development goals of the project);

• events of this project / initiative in which CLARIN participated or CLARIN event in which a representative of this project participated;

• short-, middle- or long-term goals of a co-operation with the project / initiative;

• relevance of this person or project / initiative for CLARIN

Therefore, this report will be a valuable source of reference and an instrument for monitoring the further development of these contacts.

Furthermore, links with national initiatives have been established by some consortium partners. To mention just a few:

• The German consortium partners seek the collaboration with the German grid initiative D-GRID (cf. http://www.d-grid.de/index.php?id=1&L=1).

• The Dutch consortium partners seek the collaboration with the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) project funded by the NOW (cf. http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_5XSKYG_Eng).

• The Finnish consortium partners seek the collaboration with the Finnish branch of the CESSDA initiative (http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/index.html).

However, national liaison activities, fruitful as they are for the CLARIN project, are not within the scope of this report.

2 Liaison with projects and initiatives

2.1 Projects initiatives which provide services

2.1.1 TERENA

Arrangements

Cooperation with TERENA - task force EMC2 on the interfederation technology (eduGAIN)

Details about the project / initiative

The purpose of eduGAIN is to provide the means for achieving interoperation between different Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (AAI). For further details cf. www.edugain.org.

Contact with Jaap Kuipers (Surfnet), who is interested in possible co-operations and pilots in the LRT domain. We are in contact with Karel Vietsch and Licia Florio.

Events

TERENA federation peering event, 18 May 2008, where the MPI participated. 12th TF-EMC2 Meeting, 3-4 December 2008, Utrecht, the Netherlands (cf. http://www.clarin.eu/events/edugain-meeting). Daan Broeder (MPI Nijmegen) presented the requirements of CLARIN with regard to eduGAIN. The general impression was that CLARIN could be an excellent "real-life" showcase for interfederation technology.

Goals of the co-operation

Cross-federation access to CLARIN service providers, see also the article in CLARIN newsletter #2, page1.

Relevance of the liaison for the CLARIN project

Relevant for WP2 (technical aspects) and WP7 (legal aspects).

2.1.2 APA

Arrangements

Cooperation with the Alliance for Permanent Access (APA) with regard to long-term preservation of language resources.


The Alliance aims to develop a shared vision and framework for a sustainable organizational infrastructure for permanent access to scientific information. The Alliance for Permanent Access (APA) has been established to help ensure the creation of a European Digital Information Infrastructure or in US terms a cyber infrastructure. Basically this consists of a series of repositories or archives where the digital record of science (both documents and data) is stored, curated and kept accessible. For universities, research organizations, operational agencies, funding agencies and society at large this is rapidly becoming an issue of crucial strategic importance.

The Alliance is therefore gathering a number of key players in European science and science information to bring their commitment and expertise to the creation of such an infrastructure: MPG, STFC; key libraries such as the BL, the KB or the DFG; the funding agencies are represented

through ESF; the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers is a member; as are national digital coalitions. It will work with everyone who is involved in developing these ideas. For further details cf. http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.eu/index.php?id=2 and CLARIN Newsletter #3, pp. 6-7. Contact with Peter Tindemans

Events

APA 2008 conference in Budapest, cf. http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.eu/index.php?id=3. Talk by Peter Wittenburg: “building an infrastructure for linguistics”, see also the report about this conference in the CLARIN newsletter #3, pp. 6-7.

Goals of the co-operation APA can provide help in reducing the IPR complexity, in pushing the federation harmonization and in lobbying for the kind of network of stable centres we need to establish.

APA could help in safeguarding the long-term access to linguistic resources and keeping the records of science accessible. Research information being a common good, public funding is the most likely business model for permanent access. Relevance of the liaison for the CLARIN project

The contact is relevant for WP2 (technical), WP5 (language resources), WP7 (legal).

2.1.3 DEISA

Arrangements

Cooperation with the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA 2).


DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, is a consortium of leading national Supercomputing centres that aims at fostering the pan-European world-leading computational science research.

DEISA deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment with continental scope. It aims at delivering a turnkey operational solution for a future European HPC ecosystem. And by extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA is paving the way towards the deployment and operation of a persistent cooperative European HPC ecosystem, as suggested by ESFRI.

DEISA2, funded by the European Commission in FP7, continues to develop and support the pan-European distributed high performance computing infrastructure established since 2002 within the predecessor project DEISA1 that was funded in the sixth Framework Programme. The DEISA infrastructure is based on a tight coupling of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries, using dedicated network interconnections of GÉANT2 and the projects.

The DEISA consortium is currently consolidating the existing HPC infrastructure and services. Activities and services relevant for Applications Enabling, Operations, and Technologies are continued and enhanced, as these are indispensable for the effective support of computational sciences in the area of supercomputing. In addition, DEISA is extending the service provisioning

model towards the inclusion of non-localized Virtual Science Communities. Accordingly, collaborative activities are expedited with further European and international initiatives.

We are in contact with Stefan Heinzl and Kimmo Koski.


Offering distributed computing facilities for humanities research.


WP2 (technical infrastructure)

2.1.4 DELOS

Arrangements

Co-operation with DELOS, an association of Digital Libraries


DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objectives of DELOS are research, whose results are in the public domain, and technology transfer, through cooperation agreements with interested parties.

DELOS is currently working on the development of a Digital Library Reference Model that is designed to meet the needs of the next-generation systems, and on a globally integrated prototype implementation of a Digital Library Management System, called Delos DLMS, which will serve as a concrete partial implementation of the reference model and will encompass many software components developed by DELOS partners. They are two major steps in the direction of the DELOS vision.

We are in contact with Donatella Castelli.


Coordinated work on digital library issues which are also of relevance for establishing the CLARIN infrastructure, e.g. repositories and metadata.


WP2 (technical)

2.1.5 DRIVER

Arrangements

Cooperation with the EU DRIVER initiative is planned. CLARIN centres and aggregated services will form nodes in the robust network of DRIVER content providers. It will offer its metadata descriptions so that DRIVER can harvest them and offer them in its services. Also services of DRIVER repositories should become nodes in the CLARIN network of language resource providers to make the data available for researchers. The proposed collaboration between CLARIN and DRIVER promises a joint European research infrastructure for comprehensive service to the humanities disciplines with respect to language resources and technology and therefore plays a key role in the construction of an efficient research and innovation environment (see also CLARIN Newsletter #2. p. 11). Details about the project / initiative

Considered the largest initiative of its kind in helping to enhance repository development worldwide, DRIVER is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public.

The congregation of such diverse content and services on the common DRIVER platform is of immense value to both specialized research communities and the general public.

We are in contact with Norbert Lossau and Donatella Castelli.


We want to connect humanities repositories to the DRIVER infrastructure.


WP2 (technical)

2.2 Policy making initiatives

2.2.1 Infrastructure Reflections Group

Arrangements

Cooperation with the-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG, http://www.e-irg.eu/)


The main objective of the e-Infrastructure* initiative is to support the creation of a political, technological and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe. Particular attention is directed towards grid computing, storage, and networking.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group was founded to define and recommend best practices for the pan-European electronic infrastructure efforts. It consists of official government delegates from all the EU countries. The e-IRG produces white papers, roadmaps and recommendations, and analyses the future foundations of the European Knowledge Society.

Events

Open Workshop on e-Infrastructures, Paris, 21-22 October 2008, dedicated to

• Massive scientific data issues (storage, curation, access, repositories, etc)

• Broadband circulation of data (virtual of physical organisations, communication networks, global co-operations)

• Access to large portfolios of computing resources (capability, capacity), with a special focus on the impact of numerical modelling.

cf. http://www.e-irg.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=103&Itemid=8.

Steven Krauwer participated and gave a presentation on behalf of CLARIN.


- Benefit from their recommendations about generic aspects of e-Infrastructures - Participate in discussions to ensure that CLARIN’s specific needs are addressed


WP1 (management), WP2 (Technical), WP5 (Language Resources), WP7 (IPR), WP8 (liaison with funding agencies)

2.2.2 FlareNet

Arrangements

CLARIN cooperates with FlareNet (Fostering Language Resources Network). Leading partner of FlareNet are also consortium members of CLARIN. CLARIN representatives are on the FlareNet Board. There are plans for joint events.


International cooperation and re-creation of a community are the most important drivers for a coherent evolution of the Language Resource (LR) area in the next years, especially with a view to language and speech technology development

FlareNet will be a European forum to facilitate interaction among LR stakeholders and its deliverables will take the form of policy recommendations to the EC in the area of language resources. Our most important contact person is Nicoletta Calzolari.

Events

The FlareNet Kick-off Meeting took place at ILC in Pisa on September 4-5, 2008. During a special CLARIN/FlareNet session, details of the cooperation and the optimal division of labour were discussed. CLARIN representatives participated in the FlareNet launching event, which took place in Vienna on February 12-13, 2009.


Optimal coordination between these two neighbouring projects through high level contacts and consultations, ensuring that the research infrastructure envisaged by CLARIN and the policy recommendations by FlareNet will be in line with each other.


WP1 (management), WP2 (technical infrastructure), WP5 (standards, coverage, definition of the BLARK), WP7 (IPR), WP8 (Governance and funding).

2.2.3 HERA

Arrangements


HERA – Humanities in the European Research Area - is a partnership between fifteen Humanities Research Councils across Europe and the European Science Foundation, with the objective of firmly establishing the humanities in the European Research Area and in the 6/7th Framework Programmes, cf. http://www.heranet.info.

Events

Cf. section 3.6.


Keep in contact and voice the interests of the CLARIN project.


This organisation clearly has high relevance both for WP3 and WP8 as it unites Research Councils - the target entities for WP8.

2.3 Projects / initiatives which establish research infrastructure

2.3.1 DARIAH

Arrangements

The Preparing DARIAH project started in September 2008, funded under the same scheme as CLARIN (FP7, e-infrastructures, Preparatory Phase) with Oxford University Computing Services as a member of the project consortium, with the role of liaison between DARIAH and CLARIN. OUCS participate in DARIAH WP2 (Dissemination), and Martin Wynne attended the WP2 meeting and the project kick-off meeting, both in The Hague in October 2008. Martin Wynne (OUCS) has arranged a panel session involving representatives of CLARIN, DARIAH and also the chiefly North American initiatives Project Bamboo and CenterNet to discuss the various approaches of the different initiatives at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference at the University of Maryland in June 2009. Peter Wittenburg (MPI Nijmegen) had a meeting in February 2009 with leaders of the DARIAH technical work packages from King's College, London to discuss interoperability of the technical architectures of the two projects, and good progress was made. Further meetings are scheduled.


Preparing DARIAH; http://www.dariah.eu/; Peter Doorn, DANS

Events

See above.


Ensure effective liaison and cooperation and to avoid overlaps of activities between DARIAH and CLARIN projects; reaching the Humanities community at large.


DARIAH is closely related to CLARIN as a preparatory phase research infrastructure project for the arts and humanities, included in the ESFRI roadmap, and obtaining EC funding. DARIAH has a wider scope in terms of disciplines (arts and humanities) and resource types (all digital data and tools used in these domains) and activities (supporting digitization, preservation, etc as well as use of resources). CLARIN is more focussed on language resources and technologies and their use in humanities research. There are however overlaps in the areas of interest.

2.3.2 Bamboo

Arrangements

The University of Oxford is participating in the current information-gathering and planning stages of Project Bamboo, and is acting as a liaison point between Bamboo and CLARIN. Information about the plans for the technical architecture of CLARIN have been shared with Project Bamboo leaders to help inform them about European initiatives and to promote future interoperability with their services.


Project Bamboo; http://projectbamboo.org/; Universities of Berkeley and Chicago and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Events

Four project workshops cf. http://projectbamboo.org/working-groups-workshops.


Participants from Oxford have attended four Project Bamboo workshops, where they have communicated the needs of European researchers, and informed North American partners about European initiatives. Ensure liaison and information exchange between the initiatives.


Project Bamboo aims to develop tools, services and infrastructure in some of the same domains as CLARIN, and could eventually provide a key partner organisation in North America for CLARIN to facilitate international cooperate collaboration.

2.3.3 CESSDA

Arrangements

Cooperation with CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives).


CESSDA is an umbrella organization for social science data archives across Europe. Since the 1970s the members have worked together to improve access to data for researchers and students. CESSDA research and development projects and Expert Seminars enhance exchange of data and technologies among data organizations, for further details, cf. http://www.cessda.org. We had contact with Taina Jääskeläinen, CESSDA WP 4.

Events

CLARIN participated in CESSDA WP4 workshop on terminology and nomenclature, presentation of CLARIN goals (Lothar Lemnitzer).


Search for common solutions to shared technical challenges. CLARIN might be able to present solutions for the management of the lexical and terminological data produced in this infrastructure. Interconnection with the social sciences data archives.


WP2 (technical), WP 5 (language resources).

2.3.4 ESFRI/SSH Group

Arrangements

The 5 Humanities and Social Sciences projects in the ESFRI programme have decided to exchange knowledge and experiences, through regular meetings, participating in relevant (joint) activities, and creating a joint web space on the Synaps system.


Participants are: CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS, SHARE. During the first meeting a number of joint issues were defined, and tasks divided among projects. A joint web space will be set up, which will include a calendar of events. At general ESFRI meetings on organizational and legal issues, we will as much as possible speak with ‘’one voice’’.

Events

1st meeting of the 5 project coordinators, and the Chair and Secretary of the ESFRI SSH Working Group, on January 27 in London.


The goal of the co-operation is to develop possible joint strategies about a number of issues we have in common. These can be in the organization, technical legal and practical sphere. As SSH projects we are marginal in the bulk of ESFRI (mostly natural sciences) projects. We have to try and speak with one voice, which will make us stronger.


WP2 (Technical), WP6 (Dissemination), WP7 (IPR), WP8 (Legal structure and Governance).

2.3.5. ESFRI-PP Group

Arrangements Participation in the Coordination Committee by Steven Krauwer and Bente Maegaard. Details Bottom-up initiative by coordinators of ESFRI PP projects to solve common problems connected to the creation of new infrastructures. Recognized by EC and now also involved in the preparation of ESFRI PP workshops organised by the EC. Events First meeting on December 8 2008 in the margin of the ECRI conference in Versailles Steven Krauwer and Bente Maegaard attended; regular phone conferences between members of the committee. Goals of the cooperation Sharing knowledge and expertise, finding common or shared solutions to common problems Relevance

Mostly WP8, but possibly WP2, WP5 and WP7

2.4 Projects / Initiatives in the field of language resources and tools

2.4.1 Medar

Arrangements

Cooperation with MEDAR European project (duration: 2008-2010).


MEDAR (Mediterranean Arabic Language and Speech Technology, cf. http://www.medar.info/) is a new project supported by the European Commission. The project is running from 2008 until 2010.

Bente Maegaard, leader of WP8, is the coordinator of this project.

The MEDAR project is implemented by a team of 15 partners representing 9 countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, West Bank & Gaza Strip, Denmark, France, Greece, and The Netherlands. MEDAR is formed by the former NEMLAR consortium, and as the NEMLAR project, MEDAR is coordinated by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

MEDAR has 4 main objectives: 1) Consolidating the Network of players in all areas of Arabic HLT. 2) Developing the Cooperation Roadmap based on a clear picture of the foreseeable technological trends, market potentials, and cooperation possibilities. 3) Updating the Basic Language Resource Kit: the minimum set of resources and tools necessary for carrying out research and training on LRs and HLT, with a focus on MT and MLIR. 4) Supporting the Development of tools and resources, in particular MT and MLIR on the basis of partners’ technologies and open source code (e.g. Statistical MT, MLIR, and speech recognition) and the framework for their benchmarking.

Events

On the International conference Cairo, Egypt, April 2009, CLARIN consortium members will be present.


Reaching out to the Arabic language and speech technology community.


WP5 - MEDAR has to do with language resources and tools for Arabic.

2.4.2 ADHO

Arrangements

We spoke with members of the Steering Committee and through the good offices of László Hunyady agreed to draw up a formal cooperation agreement between the two communities.


ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisation) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/ The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations represents three organisations: The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) The Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI) One of the most important target community for us. It is a strong, vibrant community from across both Europe and the USA, holding their annual conferences alternatively in Europe and the States.

Events

Last year Digital Humanities 2008 took place in Oulu. Tamás Váradi and Martin Wynne attended the conference presenting a poster and made very good contact with the key people in the community.


WP3/4 – addressing our target communities.

2.4.3 ELRA / ELDA

Arrangements

Cooperation with ELRA and its distribution agency ELDA is implemented by inclusion of ELDA as a consortium partner.


ELRA’s missions are to promote language resources for the Human Language Technology (HLT) sector, and to evaluate language engineering technologies. (cf. www.elra.org).


A primary goal is to share metadata. ELRA is currently building a Universal Catalogue. Ideally, CLARIN and ELRA catalogue data should be mutually visible; defining ELRA/ELDA’s role in relation to CLARIN.


WP2 (standards), WP5 (standards, services, taxonomy of LRT, metadata infrastructure), WP7 (licences).

2.4.4. ESF Eurobabel

Arrangements


ESF Eurobabel projects, cf. http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/eurobabel.html

Events

Peter Wittenburg and Tamás Váradi attended a workshop on 25th November 2007 in Paris organised by the ESF to prepare the EUROBABEL project (Better Analysis Based on Endangered Languages), where CLARIN was widely promoted as the most suitable infrastructure to take care of the data that arose out of the project.


CLARIN can fulfil a useful role in curating and disseminating the language resources and data yielded by the envisaged projects in line with the CLARIN objective of providing a visible and persistent network of LR depositories.


WP2 (technical)

2.5 Projects / Initiatives which build and provide frameworks

2.5.1 ISO

Arrangements

Participation in ISO TC37 SC 4, language resources management. Some CLARIN consortium members are active participants in the discussion via there national standards institutes.


The objective of ISO/TC 37/SC 4 is to prepare various standards by specifying principles and methods for creating, coding, processing and managing language resources, such as written corpora, lexical corpora, speech corpora, dictionary compiling and classification schemes. These standards will also cover the information produced by natural language processing components in these various domains. Standards produced by ISO/TC 37/SC 4 should particularly address the needs of industry and international trade as well as the global economy regarding multi-lingual information retrieval, cross-cultural technical communication and information management. The goal of ISO/TC 37/SC 4 is also to ensure that new developments in language engineering, knowledge management and information engineering satisfy the norms of international standardization for:

• developing standards and related documents to maximize the applicability of language resources, • relating the language resources of different kinds to their applications, and • enhancing the application of recognized methods and tools in language resources.

For further details, cf. http://www.tc37sc4.org/.

Events

Participation of CLARIN consortium partners at TC37 and SC meetings, 2007-08 Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, U.S.A. Goals of the co-operation

Adaptation of emerging standards for the CLARIN language resource (e.g. LMF). CLARIN issues and interests should be communicated to the standardization bodies.


WP2 and WP5 (standards for data and metadata).

2.5.2 TEI

Arrangements

Oxford University Computing Services is a key partner in the TEI, as well as in CLARIN and DARIAH, and is able to liaise between the initiatives.


The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics.

The TEI Consortium is a non-profit membership organization composed of academic institutions, research projects, and individual scholars from around the world, cf. http://www.tei-c.org/.

Events

The annual members meeting in London, November 2008, was attended by Martin Wynne (OUCS) and Andreas Witt (Tübingen), who were able to promote the work of CLARIN and inform themselves of the latest developments in the TEI community (for details of the meeting, cf. http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/cocoon/tei2008/index.html).


Adaptation of emerging standards for the CLARIN language resource (e.g. metadata header). CLARIN issues and interests should be communicated to the standardization bodies.


TEI develop guidelines, standards and tools of relevance to the LRT that CLARIN is dealing with. The TEI can potentially provide important input to the standards-related work of CLARIN WP2 and WP5.

3 Conferences and other events

3.1 LREC 2008 The international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), which takes place biannually, was held from May, 26 to June 1, 2008 in Marrakech, Morocco (LREC 2008). LREC is the most important venue for the language resource and technology community in Europe, but increasingly also for researchers and developers outside of Europe. CLARIN therefore utilized LREC 2008 as a forum for contacts with other initiatives and as forum of dissemination. As part of the main conference, Erhard Hinrichs organized and chaired a panel session entitled Key Issues in Building a Common Language Resources and Tools Infrastructure as part of the main conference. The following colleagues participated in the panel: Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC Pisa) Sebastian Drude (Museu Goeldi, Belem, Para, Brazil Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology) Erhard Hinrichs (Tübingen University); panel moderator Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University Peter Wittenburg (MPI Nijmegen) The panel addressed central issues in building a common language resources and tools infrastructure for the next generation of humanities and language technology researchers. It focused on a set of core issues that need to be addressed if the goal of building a common language resources and tools Infrastructure is to be successful. These questions include:

1. What is the scope of building a common language resources and tools infrastructure and what is the particular role that endangered and minority languages should play in this process?

2. How can language resources and tools best be made available and made accessible to the research communities at large? For example, resource providers may be fearful of what happens to "their" resources and tools. Will they be asked to hand them over to some big "data beaurocracy"? How can accessibility and IPO issues be reconciled? What technical solutions are available for all of this?

(See also the report in the CLARIN Newsletter #2, page 6). In addition to the panel, CLARIN organized a workshop and contributed several papers to the conference program. Tamás Váradi and Martin Wynne attended the workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage Data (LaTeCH cf. http://ilk.uvt.nl/latech08/), which had the special theme "Resources and Tools for Studying Language Variety and Change".

3.2 Intelligent Information Systems Conference (IIS 2008), This conference took place in Zakopane: 16-18 June 2008. The Intelligent Information Systems Conference is an annual conference organized by the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Over the years it has developed a strong presence of research papers on language resources and natural language processing. It serves as a point of contact for researchers in this field from neighbouring countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Baltic States. It therefore provides an ideal forum for dissemination of CLARIN for researchers from this part of Europe. Invited talk by Erhard Hinrichs: Language Resources: Standardization, Interoperability, and Multi-Linguality at a conference workshop on Interoperable European Language Resources and Technology, organized by Maciej Piasecki and Adam Przepiórkowski and announced as follows: “The focus of the workshop will be on resources and technologies for Polish and related languages and, in particular, we expect all Polish CLARIN participants to take an active part in the workshop, to present their resources and to discuss plans concerning their interoperability. There will also be space for more general CLARIN talks and for talks concerning related languages and issues, so we would like to cordially invite other CLARIN participants to contribute to this workshop.”

Peter Wittenburg and Erhard Hinrichs attended the Workshop.

3.3 Digital Humanities Conference 2008 This conference took place in Oulo, Finland, 25-29 June 2008. Tamás Váradi and Martin Wynne presented a poster outlining the CLARIN project at this major international conference for those working in the digital humanities. See also CLARIN Newsletter #2, page 7.

3.4 ESF workshop "Central and Eastern European Scho larship in the Humanities" This event took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, 26-28 June 2008. Marko Tadić gave a presentation of CLARIN as a relevant RI project. See also CLARIN Newsletter #2, page 7

3.5 European Researchers' Night: Digital Humanities This event took place in Debrecen and all over Europe, 26. Sept 2008, cf. http://dvc.unideb.hu. Tamás Váradi promoted CLARIN in a panel discussion along with leading figures of the ALLC on the topic of "Digital Humanities in Research and Education".

3.6 HERA 4th Annual Meeting This even took place in Strasbourg 7-9 October 2008, cf. http://www.heranet.info/Default.aspx?ID=337. Hanne Fersoe and Tamás Váradi attended the HERA Annual Meeting, where Hanne gave a high-profile short presentation of CLARIN and we also had a poster on CLARIN. The invitation came from Rüdiger Klein, head of the Standing Committee for Humanities at ESF. HERA – Humanities in the European Research Area - is a partnership between fifteen Humanities Research Councils across Europe and the European Science Foundation, with the objective of firmly establishing the humanities in the European Research Area and in the 6/7th Framework Programmes. This organisation clearly has high relevance both for WP3 and WP8 as it unites Research Councils - the target entities for WP8.

3.7 MPG E-Science Seminar on Metadata Infrastructur es This event took place in Berlin, 14-15. October 2008. The MPI group presented components of the metadata structure which will be essential for CLARIN.

3.8 Building Communities in the Digital Arts and Hu manities This International Expert Seminar on the topic of 'Building Communities in the Digital Arts and Humanities: Research Practice and Research Infrastructures' took place at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, 24-26 November 2008. CLARIN was represented my Peter Wittenberg and Martin Wynne with a presentation on CLARIN aiming to advance discussions about coordinating various international research infrastructure initiatives.

3.9 European Conference on Research Infrastructures This event took place in Versailles, France, 8-10 December 2008.

World-class Research Infrastructures are one of the pillars of an ambitious European Research Area. Access to leading research infrastructures plays a key part in maintaining Europe’s competitiveness in both basic and applied research. Research infrastructures play an increasingly important role in the advancement of knowledge and technology, offering a unique research service to users from different countries and attracting young talents to science.

• In this context, the Versailles Conference focused on the impact of Research Infrastructures; economical challenges in conjunction with the Lisbon objectives; problems of society, such as environmental concerns or expertise; training in human resources and attracting high level scientists.

(For further details, cf. http://www.ecri2008.eu/)

The CLARIN project was presented with the poster on this occasion.

3.10 4th IEEE International Conference on eScience 2008 This conference took place in Indianapolis, Dec 10-12, 2008. The e-Science 2008 conference is designed to bring together leading international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments and to highlight related activities from around the world. The conference consists of a main session and thematic workshops. As in previous e-Science conferences, this year’s conference featured a thematic workshop in the humanities. The workshop „e-Humanities – an emerging discipline“was organized jointly by three members of the CLARIN Executive Board and three members from the DARIAH project. The aim of the workshop was to focus on the specific challenges that have to be met in the humanities to reap the full benefits of an eScience infrastructure. The specific questions addressed in the Humanities and the specific types of data that are of interest require the development of dedicated algorithms. Even if these algorithms can be adapted from related disciplines, there is still a large amount of work to be done before the toolbox for e-Humanities research is reasonably complete and before existing tools can easily be combined to workflow chains by the humanities scholar who is not an expert. e-Humanities can only be successful if it is possible to provide computer tools that support scholars in their research, rather than forces them to spend lots of time learning how to use new tools, or even

worse, developing new tools. To prepare researchers for using the emerging e-Humanities tools, novel courses must be developed for undergraduate and graduate programs. However, even the best possible education cannot compensate for bad design of the tools. Therefore, the e-Humanities toolbox must come with an excellent user interface. Four of the workshop papers were contributed by CLARIN members. The eScience Conference provided an ideal forum for presenting the goals of CLARIN to an international audience of leading researchers from all scientific disciplines that are currently engaged in the design and implementation of eScience infrastructures, including renowned centres such as National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which has recently launched an ambitious program aimed specifically at the Humanities.

3.11 Building a Virtual Humanities Collaboratory This event took place in Cambridge, UK, 6-7 January 2009.A Virtual Research Environment (VRE), or collaboratory, promises to bring together tools and resources for Humanities researchers. The exponential increase in online resources and online collaboration, the range of new online tools for creating and mining many different kinds of data - visual and textual - confront Humanities researchers with an often dizzying array of possibilities.

Humanities research environments and communities are changing rapidly under the impact of new digital tools and technologies, producing many different kinds of project and databases, and demanding new kinds of expertise. As VREs take root in Universities or departments, disciplines or individual projects, it becomes ever more important to find ways to link these different scales and kinds of operation.

Some of the questions to be addressed by speakers and panels during this one and a half-day workshop include:

• What are the benefits of a virtual Collaboratory for Humanities researchers? • What are the chief obstacles to digital research in the Humanities at present? • How can universities best provide eHumanities tools and educate future humanities

researchers in their uses? • What problems of interoperability with existing infrastructures confront digital researchers in

the Humanities? • How can we manage 'data deluge' and what protocols need to be established? • What are the intellectual and academic issues at stake in digital Humanities research?

Martin Wynne gave a talk presenting CLARIN as a Pan-European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technologies.

3.12 Digital Preservation Workshop This event took place in The Hague, the Netherlands, 30 January 2009. The workshop focuses on guaranteeing the quality and trustworthiness of digital archives for research data, in particular in the social sciences and humanities. Over the past few years various initiatives have attempted to formulate guidelines and/or best practices for a “trusted digital repository”, such as DRAMBORA, TRAC, NESTOR and the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) initiative. Central issue of this workshop is the applicability of these guidelines in the social sciences and humanities. What is needed to accomplish trusted digital archives and do the now existing guidelines fulfil that need? Which issues are still missing? And how do we implement the guidelines?

Steven Krauwer presented the CLARIN point of view towards trusted digital archives.

3.13 ESFRI PP Workshops in Brussels See also section 2.3.5 above.

CLARIN participated in two workshops organized by ESFRI:

On September 29, 2008, an information day on Reporting, payments, communication and new developments for FP7 Research Infrastructure projects, Brussels, September 29, 2008. Steven Krauwer and Hetty Winkel participated. On February 6, 2009 there was a Legal workshop on exchange of Experiences between Preparatory Phase Project, in which Bente Maegaard, leader of WP8, and Hetty Winkel participated on behalf of CLARIN.

3.14 LaTech at EACL 2009

There will be a Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education at EACL 2009 in Athens, cf. http://ilk.uvt.nl/latech09/. Tamás Váradi has been invited to give an invited lecture at this workshop.

This seems to be a small but solid community with regular workshop and an agenda that bears much similarity with CLARIN objectives. In fact, cooperation with them might lead to sharing expertise and resources in the area of supporting Humanities and Social Sciences with Language Technologies.

Literature CLARIN Newsletters issues 1-4, edited by Dan Cristea and Marko Tadić (available at: http://www.clarin.eu/newsletter)

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