As we all entered into a second half of CLARIN's first year, we felt that several key issues had to be presented at this point of our project. The first one is comparison, correspondence and relations with infrastructure building initiatives and projects similar to CLARIN.
Nicoletta Calzolari is covering this topic on the front page because we believe that we can learn from others as well as others are learning from us.
The second important topic – covered by Steven Krauwer and Bente Maegaard in an opening article to this issue – is the role of EC and national funding in the phase where CLARIN currently is i.e. preparatory phase. The list of steps for building up the national CLARIN teams is given thus providing a recipe how to establish firm CLARIN communities at the national level that would easily connect to the European level. This article is clearly demonstrating the priorities and best practices to finish this task.
In this issue our regular two-fold contribution, where users and developers share their needs and solutions, covers the topic of endangered languages and the way these language data are recoded, transferred, compressed, archived and used. The contributors on the users' side are Jost Gippert, Sebastian Drude and Peter Wittenburg, while the contribution from the developers’ side is by Florian Wittenburg.
The two centerfold pages are devoted to a report (by Tamás Váradi, Marko Tadić, Peter Wittenburg and Peter Tindemans) from an ESF supported workshop of the Alliance for Permanent Access – Keeping the Records of Science Accessible: Can We Afford It? The Alliance for Permanent Access was established to ensure that research data (and not just the publications with the results of research) is freely accessible to other researchers. In this workshop different business models for long-term preservation of research data were presented and discussed. Peter Wittenburg presented CLARIN's idea of federated language archives, and three other members of CLARIN project also attended the workshop.
This issue of our Newsletter finishes with a short note by Jan Šnajder about this year ACL that took place in Columbus, Ohio and four important national correspondents’ reports: Mike Rosner from Malta, Koenraad De Smedt from Norway, Montserrat Marimon from Spain and Maciej Piasecki from Poland. Each of them is giving a survey of
LRT situation and CLARIN activities in their countries thus shaping up the European landscape that we have started to observe in previous issues of CLARIN Newsletter.
We wish you a pleasant reading.
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