For many people who attended LREC this year, the magnificent Marrakesh is still extremely alive in memories: with its narrow and crowded streets full of colours and smells, with the snake charmers performing their skills in the open, with the shop owners almost grabbing you to visit their incredible bazaar-like exhibitions, with the bargaining habits reminding that we are already in the middle of Orient although at the Greenwich longitude, with the arabesque of sculptured wood and stone heavily decorating the Muslim palaces, with the romantic riads, the authentic old-style hotels built around inner patios where the tea arrives in the glass after executing a skilful and spectacular vault in the air.
It was there that we decided to distribute a historical, if you allow us to prefigure, first issue of our CLARIN Newsletter, as we wanted to exploit the advantage of having there more than a thousand of participants working in Language Resources and Technologies for putting it directly in their hands.
We are glad now to bring to your attention our second issue. You will notice that it respects the same main schema, that we tried to impose as a constant for the CLARIN Newsletter, mainly including minimally a parallel view of developers and consumers, a presentation of major events related to CLARIN, and reports describing recent developments in the CLARIN member states.
We have invited Peter Wittenburg to open the issue with a note on a recently set up collaboration between
TERENA, another important collaborating project that builds research and educational infrastructures, and CLARIN. The reason why we have chosen this as the cover story is that we wanted thus to stress the importance of the interactivity with major pan-European initiatives intended to develop technological infrastructures that will be of help to researchers in the social sciences and humanities.
Next to this page you can read in an article by Maria Gavrilidou and Stelios Piperidis about the efforts that are being performed presently in Greece to preserve the cultural heritage and the role that the language resources and technologies play there.
The next page, bring the parallel views of consumer and the developer. This time Željko Hodonj from the Croatian News Agency has the contribution which describes how this company plans to use LR&T to further speed up their work-flow and also to make new information-broker products. The developer's view is presented professor Bojana Dalbelo Bašić from Zagreb University.
On page 5 Thierry Declerck discusses the topic which brings about the essential issue of standards in LR&T that will be of crucial importance to the CLARIN community.
We have selected for review in the middle pages three events that took place recently in Europe. LREC – the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, where at least two meetings with great relevance for CLARIN took place. They are described by Steven Krauwer. Then, the Digital Humanities Conference in Oulu, Finland is reviewed by Martin Wynne, and the ESF workshop on the role of humanities in CEE countries in Sofia, Bulgaria, presented by Marko Tadić.
Peter Wittenburg and Tamás Váradi are interviewed by us in an attempt to shed more light on the lively issue of the role of commercial companies in LR&T research in Europe, a topic which they addressed in an article in the previous issue of this newsletter. We felt that we should devote more space to the question of whether we are really in competition with the Internet and software giants.
The following articles describe two CLARIN national projects: the German one, as authored by Erhard Hinrichs, Peter Wittenburg, Alexander Geyken, Lothar Lemnitzer and Andreas Witt, and the Danish one, as authored by Hanne Fersøe.
Enjoy your reading!
