Frequently Asked Questions - Technical Centres

Centres of the type B, C and E:

• B is probably what most CLARIN centres will try to become. It is integrated into the infrastructure with all necessary building blocks: a stable repository with
  Component Metadata Infrastructure
  See: http://www.clarin.eu/cmdi
  metadata, PIDs,
  Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure
  See: Federated Identity
  -access for protected resources, a classification of its licenses based on the PUB/ACA/RES system,
  Web Services Description Language
  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language
  /
  Web Application Description Language
  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Description_Language
  descriptions for web services (next to the web service core model CMDI files).
• An E centre offers a service to other CLARIN centres but is not a part of the national CLARIN consortium.

The C centre is the bare minimum: a centre that has web-accessible resources that provides

Open Language Archives Community

See: http://www.language-archives.org

or CMDI metadata about these over

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative_Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesting

.

The answer to this question depends on which centre you want to get in touch with. All centres are part of a national consortium. However, some services are provided at a European level. For detailed questions about the centres, see www.clarin.eu/centres. 

Can everyone act as a CLARIN centre in the emerging network? No - since centres need to fulfill a number of criteria mentioned in the Requirements Specification Documents. In particular these centres need to make a commitment statement that they will give their services for a defined period of time at a certain service level which is dependent on the type of service. Setting up centres that adhere to these requirements costs money, therefore it is obvious that centres need to have clear funding basis.

Researchers will only use certain resources and certain tools/services offered via the web when they are sure that they can access them also for a longer period of time. Currently, researchers mostly download resources first to their computer to create accessibility, but in the cyberinfrastructure scenario with many large resources and collections this way is not suitable anymore. So availability and accessibility have to be guaranteed by institutions with a clear service oriented attitude that do pose as little restrictions as possible on the usage by the researchers. Only this new type of centres can give such guarantees.

Centres will form the backbone of the persistent and stable CLARIN service infrastructure. For further information we refer to the Requirements Specification Document and to the Short Guides.