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Centre news vol. 49 - July 2020

Submitted by Dieter Van Uytvanck on

Virtual Language Observatory 4.9.0 released

A new version of the is available at https://vlo.clarin.eu. A number of new features and improvements have been introduced since the previous release of the VLO. The first change you might notice is that the languages associated with a record are now prominently shown among the search results. There are also several changes that don’t catch the eye so easily but we think will improve the experience of using the VLO; for example, there are more descriptive labels for the file types of linked resources in the ‘links’ tab of the record page. Furthermore, although invisible to the average visitor, providers of metadata will be interested to know that this version of the VLO provides structured data describing a ‘DataSet’ object as defined in the Schema.org vocabulary in the header of the record page for any record harvested from a CLARIN centre that links to a landing page. This allows for data set discovery by third parties, for instance by Google for its data search service - see Google’s description of their approach to dataset discovery for more information on this. As always, this release will also contain various miscellaneous small fixes and improvements. See the change log for a more complete list of changes.

We highly appreciate any feedback on this version of the VLO. Please send any questions, comments or suggestions to vlo [at] clarin.eu (vlo[at]clarin[dot]eu).

New Centre Registry version

The Centre Registry 2.3.0 has been released. Details can be found in the change log. Most since most changes relate to the back-end, one important exception is a breaking change to the XML . We believe all consumers of this API have been identified and have adjusted their use of the API accordingly.

New C-centre

We welcome the TextGrid Repository as a new CLARIN C-centre! Its metadata is now also available through the VLO.

New FCS endpoints

The French Cocoon centre and the Portuguese PORTULAN centre have recently added an endpoint to the Federated Content Search. You can now search within the content of their resources through the Content Search Engine.

Link Checker request

The Link Checker is to be enhanced with better recognition of login pages, to return a more correct status code (restricted access) for login pages that return an HTTP 200 status code.

If you wish to add your login page URL, just do a pull request with an edit on the list.txt file, adding your login page URL (or discovery service) as a new line. Thanks for your support!

Read more about the Curation Module and the Link Checker in the FAQ.

CLARIN Hackathon: looking for datasets on disinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In September 2020, CLARIN will organise a hackathon on the topic of disinformation on the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose CLARIN is building an inventory of existing datasets that collect disinformation and fake news related to COVID-19. If you would like to contribute to our effort and you know about existing datasets covering these topics, please get in touch at hackathon [at] clarin.eu (hackathon[at]clarin[dot]eu). We are also interested in learning about any on-going projects, activities, initiatives and research teams on this topic within the CLARIN network.

More information on the hackathon will follow soon, in the meantime if you want to know more about other initiatives for data collection and infrastructural support related to COVID-19, you can visit our CLARIN & COVID-19 page.

Fedora Commons Interest Group

After an earlier online meeting in June with David Wilcox from Lyrasis (see presentation and background document from CLARIAH-DE), a Fedora Commons interest group has been initiated for those interested in:

  • the upcoming version of Fedora (v6)

  • migrations to v6 (e.g. from v3)

  • how to use it as a CLARIN-compliant repository

If you are interested in this topic, feel free to subscribe to the Fedora Commons interest group mailing list. And forgive us the TLS warning, this should be solved soon.