FLAT: Constructing a CLARIN Compatible Home for Language Resources

FLAT: Constructing a CLARIN Compatible Home for Language Resources Menzo Windhouwer,a Marc Kemps-Snijders,a Paul Trilsbeek,b André Moreira,b Bas van der Veen,a Guilherme Silva,b Daniel von Reihnb aMeertens Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands bThe Language Archive – Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, The Netherlands E-mail: {Menzo.Windhouwer, Marc.Kemps.Snijders, Bas.van.der.Veen}@meertens.knaw.nl, {Paul.Trilsbeek, Andre.Moreira, Guilherme.Silva, Daniel.vonRhein}@mpi.nl Abstract Language resources are valuable assets, both for institutions and researchers. To safeguard these resources requirements for repository systems and data management have been specified by various branch organizations, e.g., CLARIN and the Data Seal of Approval. This paper describes these and some additional ones posed by the authors’ home institutions. And it shows how they are met by FLAT, to provide a new home for language resources. The basis of FLAT is formed by the Fedora Commons repository system. This repository system can meet many of the requirements out-of-the box, but still additional configuration and some development work is needed to meet the remaining ones, e.g., to add support for Handles and Component Metadata. This paper describes design decisions taken in the construction of FLAT’s system architecture via a mix-and-match strategy, with a preference for the reuse of existing solutions. FLAT is developed and used by the a Institute and The Language Archive, but is also freely available for anyone in need of a CLARIN-compliant repository for their language resources. Keywords: CLARIN, repository system, component metadata 1. Introduction A repository, which provides access to language resources, is not only a valuable asset for its home organization but also for the whole community of humanities scholars. Often these resources can be considered treasures of cultural heritage. This is showcased by the recent recognition of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for collections in The Language Archive (The Language Archive, 2015). There are many ways to setup a repository ranging from a homegrown solution to open source or commercial systems used by many organizations. The Language Archive (MPI for Psycholinguistics, 2016) and the Meertens Institute (Meertens Institute, 2016a) have both a long history in digital archiving, which started when general purpose repository systems were not yet available. Departing from such homegrown solutions, these institutes recently started the construction of FLAT (Fedora Language Archiving Technology); 1 a new repository system based on open source components with custom extensions for specific purposes. 2. Requirement Analysis To safeguard these valuable language resources and to serve the interested researchers well, requirements for repository systems and data management have been specified by various branch organizations. In the construction of FLAT these requirements, mainly influenced by the CLARIN e-infrastructure (CLARIN ERIC, 2016b), which also implies passing the 1 Actually FLAT is not limited to language resources, so Fedora Long-term Archiving Technology is also a valid interpretation of the acronym. The meaning of other abbreviations used in this paper can be found in Appendix A. certification procedures of the Data Seal of Approval (DSA, 2016), are taken into account next to the needs of the home institutions. Many of these requirements deal with organizational issues, but …

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