Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3406–3413 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3406 Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN Franciska de Jong1, Bente Maegaard2, Darja Fiˇser3, Dieter Van Uytvanck4, Andreas Witt5 1,2,3,4,5CLARIN ERIC, 2University of Copenhagen, 3University of Ljubljana and Joˇzef Stefan Institute, 5Leibniz Institute for the German Language and University of Mannheim 1,4Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2Copenhagen, Denmark, 3Ljubljana, Slovenia, 5Mannheim, Germany; 1f.m.g.dejong@uu.nl, 2bmaegaard@hum.ku.dk, 3darja.fiser@ff.uni-lj.si, 4dieter@clarin.eu, 5witt@ids-mannheim.de Abstract CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastruc- tural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider domain of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collab- oration. For each level, some concrete outcomes are described. Keywords: CLARIN, language resources, research infrastructure, Open Science, interoperability, multidisciplinarity, EOSC 1. Introduction More and more data is becoming available in digital for- mats, and research infrastructures are expected to provide their communities with access to the available resources. Thematically focused research infrastructures typically do so through a combination of generic infrastructural ser- vice components such as e.g., persistent identifiers and bitstream preservation, and domain-specific or thematic components that take both the content and the context of the resources into account. Nowadays most publicly funded infrastructural initiatives adhere to the Open Sci- ence agenda and express the ambition to provide access to data collections in line with the FAIR principles for data management (Wilkinson et al., 2016) and thus aim at maximizing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability.1 As underlined by several important bodies such as the Eu- ropean Commission (Hodson et al., 2018), the added value in such agendas and the underlying values in the way they stimulate the relevant communities to work towards the re- alization of the objectives, rather than considering features such as interoperability or reusability as an absolute mea- sure for acceptance by the ecosystem. Interoperability can only be pursued effectively if it is not just targeted at tech- nical levels, such as syntactic interoperability of metadata formats, but as a set of goals embedded in a culture that is characterized by attention for all social, political, and or- ganizational factors that impact system-to-system perfor- mance. CLARIN (Common LAnguage Resources and technology Infrastructure) is one of …

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