CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure
CLARIN Knowledge Centres (K-centres) are a cornerstone of the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure (KI), one of the main components ensuring a continuous transfer of knowledge between all players involved in the construction, operation and use of the infrastructure. The mission of the CLARIN KI is to ensure that the available knowledge and expertise does not exist as a fragmented collection of unconnected bits and pieces, but is made accessible in an organised way to both the CLARIN community and the social sciences and humanities research community more widely.
The Role of K-Centres
The focus of CLARIN is on language resources (in all modalities, from all regions and with any topical orientation) and K-centres serve researchers and educators from any discipline where language plays one of its many roles, ranging from object of study, a means of communication or expression, a means to store and extract information, object of learning or teaching activities, to training source for data-driven analytics, and many others. K-centres share their knowledge and expertise on one or more aspects of the domain covered by the CLARIN infrastructure and can be mostly found in CLARIN countries, but also beyond.
Areas of K-Centre Expertise
K-centres all have their own specific areas of expertise, including:
- Individual languages (e.g. Danish, Czech, Portuguese), language families (e.g. South Slavic) or groups of languages (e.g. morphologically rich languages, the languages of Sweden)
- Written text and modalities other than written text (e.g. spoken language, sign language)
- Linguistic topics (e.g. language diversity, language learning, diachronic studies)
- Language processing topics (e.g. speech analysis, building treebanks, machine translation)
- Data types other than corpora (e.g. lexical data, word nets, terminology banks)
- Using or processing families of language data that will exist for most languages (e.g. newspapers, parliamentary records, oral history)
- Generic methods and issues (e.g. data management, ethics, IPR, OCR)
Services Offered by K-Centres
All K-centres have a helpdesk that will respond to requests within two working days. Some offer online courses, some offer best-practice documents, some offer guidance in getting access to and using data and tools, some are willing to host receivers of CLARIN mobility grants, and there are many more models in which the expertise is offered and shared.
Finding K-Centres
The different categories listed under 'Areas of K-centre expertise' (one of the sections on this page) all link directly to the list of K-centres offering the expertise in that category with a short descriptions. More detailed information can be found on the home pages of the K-centres. To find K-centres that offer the expertise you need please check the following pages:
- The alphabetically ordered list of all K-centres with a summary of the expertise and the services they can offer
- Keyword-based search
- The Tour de CLARIN page with presentations of individual K-centres and interviews with people working there
- The NEW K-Centres catalogue, which merges the alphabetical list and keyword search functionalities on a single page.
How to Establish a K-Centre
Read and fill out the application form and guidelines for obtaining the status of CLARIN K(nowlegde) Centre. The completed application form should be submitted by the head of the institution(s) and sent to k-centre-application [at] clarin.eu (k-centre-application[at]clarin[dot]eu). The application will be reviewed by the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure Committee (KIC). The Committee will send feed-back or requests for clarification to the applicant, and make its recommendation to the CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors.