CLARIN Centres

CLARIN's distributed network is made up of centres. There are several types of centres: B-centres, C-centres and K-centres, each offering different kinds of expertise and services.

B-Centres: Technical Centres

The backbone of CLARIN is provided by technical centres, known as Service Providing Centres or CLARIN B-centres for short. These units, often a university or an academic institute, offer the scientific community access to resources, services and knowledge on a sustainable basis.
Currently there are more than 20 certified B-centres and several more centre candidates. This list is constantly growing, as new members join CLARIN . Information on all B-centres and their services can be found in the Centre Registry.

See the full list of all certified B-centres here.

There are strict criteria to become a CLARIN B-centre: it should be based on a stable technical and institutional foundation. The Assessment Committee checks these requirements during an assessment procedure, while the technical coordination among the centres takes place in the Centre Committee.

Regular updates about the B-centre and C-centre network can be found in the Centre News blogs. Please subscribe to the all-centres mailing list if you would like to receive these updates by email.

C-Centres: Metadata Providing Centres

Their metadata are integrated with CLARIN, but they need not offer any further services.

K-Centres: Knowledge Centres

K-Centres share their knowledge and expertise on one or more aspects of the domain covered by the CLARIN infrastructure.

The focus of CLARIN is on language resources (in all modalities, from all regions and with any topical orientation) and K-centres serve researchers and educators from any discipline where language plays one of its many roles, ranging from object of study, a means of communication or expression, a means to store and extract information, object of learning or teaching activities, to training source for data-driven analytics, and many others. K-centres can be mostly found in CLARIN countries, but also exist elsewhere, and they all have a virtual presence.

You can find K-centres by searching an alphabetically ordered list of all K-centres or by performing a keyword-based search.

Read more here on the various areas of K-centre expertise and services offered, as well as how to establish a K-centre.

For a comprehensive list of all established CLARIN centres, see the Overview of CLARIN centres.

For an impression of individual centres, you can browse the Tour de CLARIN page, which features individual K-centres and B-centres, along with interviews with researchers who have used the local resources and expertise.