The CLARIN-NL Project

AbstractIn this paper I present the CLARIN-NL project, the Dutch national project that aims to play a central role in the European CLARIN infrastructure, not only for the preparatory phase, but also for the implementation and exploitation phases. I argue that the way the CLARIN-NL project has been set-up can serve as an excellent example for other national CLARIN projects, for the following reasons: (1) it is a mix between a programme and a project; (2) it offers opportunities to seriously test standards and protocols currently proposed by CLARIN, thus providing evidence-based requirements and desiderata for the CLARIN infrastructure and ensuring compatibility of CLARIN with national data and tools; (3) it brings the intended users (humanities researchers) and the technology providers (infrastructure specialists and language and speech technology researchers) together in concrete cooperation projects, with a central role for the user’s research questions,, thus ensuring that the infrastructure will provide functionality that is needed by its intended users.