The CLARIN project: a scientific research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences

This article presents the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technologies) project, a large-scale pan-European collaborative project that aims to promote the use of technological tools in research in the fields of the humanities and social sciences.CLARIN is one of the 35 projects selected by ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) to form a list of infrastructures that need to be built, due to their importance in terms of research, in the next ten years. CLARIN aims to bring the benefits of shared and collaborative access to digital resources to the humanities and social sciences and increase use of specific analysis and exploitation computing tools for intelligent access to large databases. With this in mind, CLARIN is to create the infrastructure needed to offer generic access to large databases, alongside technological tools for the analysis and exploitation of the data. To do so, the project envisions a grid structure using web service and semantic web technologies, a single interface for accessing data and analysis tools, as well as the processing tools and other services needed. This interface, due to the fact that is designed to meet the common research aims in the humanities and social sciences, is easy to use by researchers from different fields without any prior knowledge of the technology involved.