Common Language Resources Infrastructure Norway Upgrade

Researchers in the language sciences and humanities produce and use a lot of data, such as digital lexical resources, text corpora, term banks, speech and video recordings, literary and historical archives and data from interviews and experiments – everything that has to do with language as social and cultural data. CLARINO is the national infrastructure that makes language related data accessible through advanced web based services. The infrastructure is Norway’s contribution to the European infrastructure for language CLARIN ERIC, in co-operation with 25 countries. The present project CLARINO+ has upgraded this infrastructure from 2020 through 2023, so that it can offer better data, tools and services. The project has made the infrastructure better known among potential users and has been organizing user support and training. The infrastructure has been upgraded with new and more powerful computer systems. The data centers were recertified and got a new appearance. The data collections have been extended with new corpora and treebanks, the ELMCIP database about electronic literature and WAB about Wittgenstein's writings. More texts have been added to Menota, an archive of Middle Age texts. The Term Portal has a new and better website with more termbanks. The corpus services, associated tools and metadata management have become better and more user-friendly. CLARINO+ also made a substantial effort to make the infrastructure more widely known through courses, seminars, videos, blogs and publications. The upgraded infrastructure is in active use in many research projects, including three large lexicographic projects in Norway.

-

Norway is a member of the CLARIN ERIC, the European infrastructure for language resources and technology. The national CLARINO infrastructure, which is on the Norwegian Roadmap for Research Infrastructure 2018, is Norway's in-kind contribution to the ERIC. CLARINO operates four Norwegian nodes in the CLARIN distributed architecture. Through national and international cooperation, CLARINO make language resources findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) for researchers, students and others. Norwegian membership in the CLARIN ERIC implies obligations towards maintaining the Norwegian nodes as well as continued participation in central CLARIN ERIC activities. The current CLARINO+ proposal therefore intends to upgrade CLARINO and bring it up to date with recent developments in technology, standards, available data and user needs. The project will adopt new international technological standards and methods, such as CMDI 1.2 and FCS 2.0, and increase its processing capacity. The project will also reposition the infrastructure with respect to user groups, newly available data and related service providers in Norway. CLARINO+ will, in cooperation with the CLARIN ERIC, implement updated strategies for interoperability, uptake, governance and sustainability. Important collections and updated resources will be integrated into the infrastructure. Metadata services will be consolidated, improved tools will unlock the data for R&D, and new interfaces will bring CLARINO services within easier reach of existing and new target groups in the Humanities and other research areas using language data. Optimal use of the renewed infrastructure will be promoted by uptake actions including dissemination, user involvement and training.