Research Infrastructure

A Research Infrastructure is about improving the accessibility and enrichment of resources and technology by the researchers. As an electricity network with power stations, relay stations and plugs are helping us all to access electric power, scientifically relevant resources and technology should be easily available to the researchers. However, any infrastructure is dependent on the availability of suitable and sufficient primary resources, i.e., new language resources have to be created and integrated.
Given all the structural and encoding differences and given all the access boundaries we are far away from having achieved a satisfying state. The fragmentation of resources in the humanities is so extreme, that most of the resources are not digitized, if digitized they are not locatable by metadata and they are certainly not accessible. Much technology (Human Language Technology) has been developed in our field, but effectively it cannot be used by the researchers due to the fragmented situation. Therefore, much time is wasted again and again to locate and access data resources, to locate and execute suitable tools for such data resources and to apply knowledge to bridge for example technology gaps.

ESFRI Definition
The ESFRI documents say the following: 'The term e-Infrastructure is used to indicate the integrated ICT-based Research Infrastructure in Europe. The e-Infrastructure viewpoint allows to join and fit all interrelated infrastructures together and start think of them as a system – and optimize not for each individual part, but for the whole. The prime goal of the e-Infrastructure may be to support e-science, e-health and e-culture, but at the same time opportunities are created for many other application domains that contribute to society such as e-commerce, e-government, e-training and e-education. A competitive e-infrastructure is indispensable for the numerically oriented branches of the sciences. Also from traditionally less computer-oriented areas such as the social sciences, the humanities and biodiversity there is an strong trend towards mass deployment of ICT to manage the large variety of decentralized data sources and find novel approaches to traditional problems. Key components of the e-infrastructure are networking infrastructures, middleware and organization and various types of resources.'

Enabling eScience
So, a Language Resource and Technology RI is about (1) enabling the eSCIENCE scenario for the language resource oriented disciplines, i.e. the researchers in the humanities and even beyond and their future needs are primary, (2) fostering the language oriented research in the humanities in the new Internet era, (3) establishing a domain of distributed repositories, services and expertise. Language resources and technology covering data, tools and knowledge are key to all humanities disciplines, however, the views on them are different, the methods to use them are different and the agendas of the humanities disciplines are different. Therefore, it makes sense to distinguish the disciplines that look at language resources from a language or technological point of view such as linguistics or language engineers from those that will make use of language resources for interpretational purposes such as theology, history etc. The former can play the role as technology or infrastructure providers for their own purposes and for the benefit of the other disciplines.

Putting it this way it obvious that a research infrastructure only makes sense if its services are persistent. Otherwise researchers will not make themselves dependent on it.