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resources and technology overview; <strong>in</strong>formation gather<strong>in</strong>g and dissem<strong>in</strong>ation; <strong>in</strong>tellectual property
rights and bus<strong>in</strong>ess models; and construction and exploitation agreements. CLARIN is still <strong>in</strong> its
preparatory stage and envisions two later phases, a construction phase and an exploitation phase. This
preparatory phase has a number of objectives, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g organiz<strong>in</strong>g the fund<strong>in</strong>g and governance <strong>in</strong> 22
countries and thoroughly explor<strong>in</strong>g the technical dimension, for, as Váradi et al. admit, “a language
resources and technology <strong>in</strong>frastructure is a novel concept.” CLARIN is fully <strong>in</strong>vestigat<strong>in</strong>g the user
dimension and is undertak<strong>in</strong>g an analysis of how language technology is currently used <strong>in</strong> the
humanities to make sure that all developed technical specifications meet the actual needs of humanities
users. This scop<strong>in</strong>g study and research <strong>in</strong>cludes undertak<strong>in</strong>g a number of typical humanities research
projects to help validate developed prototypes. 738 In addition, they plan to conduct outreach to less
technologically advanced sections of the humanities and social sciences to promote the use of language
resources and technology (Váradi et al. 2008). CLARIN is also seek<strong>in</strong>g to br<strong>in</strong>g together the
humanities and language technology communities, and it plans to collaborate with DARIAH <strong>in</strong> this
area and others. 739
One example of a humanities case study was reported by Villegas and Parra (2009), who explored the
scenario of a social historian wish<strong>in</strong>g to conduct a search of multiple newspaper archives. They found
that provid<strong>in</strong>g access to primary source data that were “highly distributed and stored <strong>in</strong> different
applications with different formats” was very difficult and that humanities researchers required the
“<strong>in</strong>tegration and <strong>in</strong>teroperability of distributed and heterogeneous research data.” Villegas and Parra
<strong>in</strong>cluded a detailed analysis of the complicated steps required to create a f<strong>in</strong>al environment where the
user could actually analyze the data. They also provided some <strong>in</strong>sights for further CLARIN research
and ongo<strong>in</strong>g case studies; namely, that (1) humanists need to be made better aware of exist<strong>in</strong>g
l<strong>in</strong>guistics resources and tools; (2) users need <strong>in</strong>tegrated access to data with more automated processes
to simplify laborious data-gather<strong>in</strong>g and -<strong>in</strong>tegration tasks; (3) the use of standards and protocols
would help make data <strong>in</strong>tegration easier; (4) NLP tools require textual data <strong>in</strong> order to perform
automated analysis but many data providers do not provide access to their data <strong>in</strong> a textual format; and
(5) the use of web services with standardized <strong>in</strong>terfaces and strongly typed XML messages could help
guarantee <strong>in</strong>teroperability of resources and tools. The authors admit that this last desideratum will
require a great deal of consensus among service providers.
In addition to study<strong>in</strong>g how humanities users might use language tools and resources, CLARIN plans
to <strong>in</strong>clude language resources for all European languages <strong>in</strong> participat<strong>in</strong>g countries, and it has def<strong>in</strong>ed
BLARK, or a Basic Language Resources Toolkit, that will be required for each well-documented
language. BLARKs must consist of two types of lexicons, one “form based” and one “lexical
semantic,” or essentially a treebank and an automatically annotated larger corpus. As part of this work,
CLARIN has recently made a number of services available on its website under its “Virtual Language
Observatory.” 740 Included among these services are massive language-resource and language-tool
<strong>in</strong>ventories that can be searched or browsed by faceted metadata.
738 As various publications and deliverables are completed for the various work packages, all reports can be downloaded from the CLARIN website
(http://www.clar<strong>in</strong>.eu/deliverables).
739 In July of 2011, both CLARIN and DARIAH signed a “letter of <strong>in</strong>tent” with EGI (European Grid Infrastructure (http://www.egi.eu)), “which has the
express <strong>in</strong>tention of ensur<strong>in</strong>g that technology developed by the two ESFRI projects and EGI are compatible and provides the best service to their users.”
Both CLARIN and DARIAH are funded by ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), and this agreement with the EGI has the end
goal of ensur<strong>in</strong>g that all three projects “develop common tools and technologies while explor<strong>in</strong>g further opportunities for collaboration.”
(http://www.dariah.eu/<strong>in</strong>dex.phpoption=com_content&view=article&id=151:egi-signed-letter-of-<strong>in</strong>tent-with-dariah-andclar<strong>in</strong>&catid=3:dariah&Itemid=197)
740 http://www.clar<strong>in</strong>.eu/vlo/ and for more details on this resource, see (Uytvanck et al. 2010).