Facilitating Metadata Interoperability in CLARIN-DK

Facilitating Metadata Interoperability in CLARIN-DK Lene Offersgaard, Dorte Haltrup Hansen University of Copenhagen, Centre for Language Technology, NFI Njalsgade 140, DK-2300 Copenhagen, Denmark E-mail: leneo@hum.ku.dk, dorteh@hum.ku.dk Abstract The issue for CLARIN archives at the metadata level is to facilitate the user’s possibility to describe their data, even with their own standard, and at the same time make these metadata meaningful for a variety of users with a variety of resource types, and ensure that the metadata are useful for search across all resources both at the national and at the European level. We see that different people from different research communities fill in the metadata in different ways even though the metadata was defined and documented. This has impacted when the metadata are harvested and displayed in different environments. A loss of information is at stake. In this paper we view the challenges of ensuring metadata interoperability through examples of propagation of metadata values from the CLARIN-DK archive to the VLO. We see that the CLARIN Community in many ways support interoperability, but argue that agreeing upon standards, making clear definitions of the semantics of the metadata and their content is inevitable for the interoperability to work successfully. The key points are clear and freely available definitions, accessible documentation and easily usable facilities and guidelines for the metadata creators. Keywords: metadata, interoperability, CLARIN, VLO 1. Introduction The goal for the CLARIN-DK infrastructure is to enable researchers to share and reuse language-based resources and to facilitate services that ease the research in these resources. CLARIN-DK therefore sees it as essential to provide a framework for easy storage, easy metadata assignment and easy retrieval. Compared to traditional archives that handle homogeneous materials, CLARIN-DK handles a wide range of resource types from different research areas. It currently consists of an archive with language-based resources in the form of single texts, text corpora, video, audio, lexica and web services for corpus search and processing of textual data. CLARIN-DK is both an integral part of the Danish research infrastructure for Digital Humanities, DIGHUMLAB, and member of the pan-European CLARIN ERIC. As part of the CLARIN infrastructure, CLARIN-DK can be described as a bottom-up receiver of heterogeneous material from different research areas in Denmark and propagating metadata description of these to the European CLARIN level, giving researchers the options to find new data and re-use them in a top–down approach. To enable the discovery of resources, use of standards for resource formats and metadata are crucial. In some sense everybody can agree upon the necessity of using standards in archives and research infrastructures but heterogeneous material with heterogeneous metadata can be difficult to facilitate in fixed metadata sets, and it can be difficult even to agree upon the metadata values to be used. In this paper we will view the quality aspect of metadata (henceforth MD) in the light of interoperability for both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and show how ensuring interoperability can be implemented and how it has more challenging aspects than sharing the use …

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