Skip to main content

VLO 3.1 released

Submitted by Twan Goosen on

Earlier this week, we released a new minor version of the Virtual Language Resource ( ) faceted browser. At first glance, most users will not notice many differences between the new version 3.1 and the version previously available, version 3.0.1. However, in addition to a number of small tweaks and fixes in the user interface, quite some changes have taken place in the VLO importer component, which takes the metadata records harvested from the CLARIN centres and various other centres, and produces the "index" that contains the fields and facets as they appear in the faceted browser.

The VLO importer does not simply index the values it finds in the metadata records verbatim, but rather contains logic to map values from these records to values in a limited set of fields and facets, depending on contextual semantics. A number of improvements with respect to this mapping have been made. One of the value mappings that takes place is the mapping from language code (for example the ISO-639-3 code 'deu' for German) to language name. The support for language codes has been extended, so that more languages now appear by their name rather than code. A new field "license" has been added, which contains the license information for an individual record if available. In future versions of the VLO, it will be possible to filter for records with a specific (type of) license. Finally, the mapping to the "national project" facet, which is based on the collection name defined in the metadata record, is now more flexible as it now support regular expressions. 

In addition to value/field mapping, values are curated automatically to some degree. For example, in this new version, variations on organization names (such as Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsMax Planck Institute Nijmegen, and MPI-PL, which all refer to the same institution) get mapped to a canonical name to allow for easy selection of records related to a single organization.

Finally, the search suggestions functionality, which is activated when a user starts typing words into the textual search bar of the VLO, has been reconfigured to cover more fields within records. This increases the search efficiency, as users will be more likely to enter relevant search terms.