Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch CLARIN-EU: Where do we stand? Steven Krauwer Utrecht institute of Linguistics UiL OTS CLARIN-EU Coordinator

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Overview General –The idea –Characteristics –Overall plan –Division of labour –Why should NL participate –Priority activities Where we stand –Financial –Technical –Users –Language resources and tools –Dissemination –IPR and legal issues –Governance and funding Concluding remarks

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch CLARIN: the idea Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure: the basic idea is –to create a European federation of existing digital repositories that include language based data (e.g. text, audio, video, gesture, multimodal) –with uniform access to the data wherever it is –with easy access to existing language and speech technology tools as web services, to retrieve, manipulate, enhance, explore and exploit the data –with as its primary target audience researchers in social sciences and humanities (i.e. in general people without technological background)

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch CLARIN: some characteristics Highly distributed, very much bottom-up CLARIN should eventually cover all EU and associated countries CLARIN should eventually be jointly funded by all participating countries (plus some EC contribution) All languages (spoken or studied in participating countries) equally important At this moment 33 consortium partners in 23 countries, more countries to join Participation (unpaid for non-partners) in Preparatory Phase by >150 member organisations in 32 countries

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Overall plan for CLARIN-EU Preparatory phase ( ) Put everything in place before we start (design, governance, funding, …) ( and build a prototype ) Construction phase ( ): Build the infrastructure and populate it with tools and resources ( and start using it ) Exploitation phase (2016- …): CLARIN in full service

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Division of labour In the preparatory phase: –CLARIN-EU takes care of overall design –CLARIN-National takes care of interests of own language(s) and research communities –But we are not supposed to build the infrastructure yet! In the construction phase: –Each country builds its own part of the generic CLARIN infrastructure (and pays for it) –Each country populates CLARIN with resources and services (and pays for it) –And we hope for some funding from the EC to contribute to the general costs

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Why should NL participate at all access for HSS scholars to accumulated knowledge and expertise and to digital resources and tools all over Europe the achievements of the NL research community, and Dutch language and culture will be and remain visible and accessible all over Europe if we don’t take care of the interests of “our” languages and our research communities in CLARIN no one else will do it for us

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Priority activities for now (1) Start building the national component of the generic federation and service infrastructure, connected to the European CLARIN infrastructure (identifying data and service centres, centres of expertise, and connecting them) Start populating the infrastructure with existing resources and tools by conversion and encapsulation so that they comply with CLARIN supported standards for representation and interoperability

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Priority activities for now (2) Start planning and (if possible) building new resources and tools according to own priorities following from existing and future research programmes for the social sciences and humanities Start reaching out to the national humanities and social sciences research communities in order to –identify their needs and requirements –familiarize them with the benefits and innovative potential of the use of human language technologies in their work –encourage them to use CLARIN to cross national and discipline borderlines

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Where we stand We are now almost halfway the preparatory phase (19 months to go) Just a quick look at some aspects: –Financial –Technical infrastructure –User requirements –Language resources and tools –Dissemination –IPR and legal issues –Funding and governance

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Financial (1) Budget prep phase: 4.1 M€ from EC (“CLARIN-EU”) at this moment in addition ca 8 M€ from countries (“CLARIN-national”) and some 7.3 M€ for parallel activities Overall budget estimate until 2020: ca 146 M€ to be paid by participating countries looks like a lot of money but (compare with other research infrastructures!): –< 12 M€ per year –< 0.5 M€ per country per year –< ?? M€ per language per year

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Financial (2) National contributions: NL only country with commitments for preparatory phase, construction phase and start of exploitation phase (9 M€) 16 countries have made commitments to CLARIN preparatory phase (26 K€ M€) 19 countries have launched parallel projects that might feed into CLARIN (11 K€ M€) No supported activity at all in 3 countries (out of 23)

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Technical infrastructure Done: –Definition of centre types –Requirements for the federation –Persistent identifiers –Registry requirements –Web services and workflow requirements To do: –Take design decisions –Select initial centres –Prototype implementation –Cost estimates for next phase

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch User requirements Done Survey (ongoing) Overview of humanities projects (ongoing) Call for humanities projects To do Execution of humanities projects Continuation of surveys and impact studies Strategic plan for supporting SSH research

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Language resources and tools (1) Done Survey and taxonomy Interoperability requirements Analysis of current LRT coverage Criteria and priorities for integration Usage scenarios and interoperability case studies

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Language resources and tools (2) To do: Continuation of survey & taxonomy Quality criteria BLARK description for the humanities and analysis of what exists per language LRT workflows Interoperability standards (not 1, not new, but based on set of supported existing standards) Validation of standards and prototype Integration of existing LRT Plan to fill LRT gaps

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Dissemination Done: –First version of website: –Issues 1-5 of the newsletter published: –Design of helpdesk and registry prototype To do: –Enhancing the website –Continuation of quarterly newsletters –Plan for helpdesk and advice infrastructure for next phases

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch IPR and legal issues Done (and still ongoing): –Collecting info on existing licenses (models, problems) –Collecting info on existing legislation –Model for authorization and authentication To do: –Small set of licensing templates –Collaboration with other, related services –Federation agreements

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Governance and funding Done: Requirements and best practice for transnational coordination and governance To do: Provide cost estimates to funding agencies Agree (with funding agencies) on governance model and implement it Agree (with funding agencies) on sustainable funding for the next phases Design and implement operational structure

Steven KrauwerCLARIN-NL Launch Concluding remarks First 17 months mostly spent on collecting information and requirements and creating a common ‘conceptual framework’, now time for convergence and firm decisions Less than 19 months to achieve this, because –governments take far more time for funding decisions than anticipated –national activities are already ongoing, need for standards for representation and interoperability NOW Target: all the important decisions in place by the end of 2009 / early 2010 to ensure continuity after 2010! CLARIN-NL can play a strong role because we are the only ones that are guaranteed to exist as a funded activity on Jan 1 st 2011!