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Menzo Windhouwer awarded the 2019 Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements

The 2019 Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements is awarded to Menzo Windhouwer (Meertens Institute, KNAW Humanities Cluster, Digital Infrastructure).


Menzo Windhouwer has been involved in CLARIN from the very start. One of his main focus areas was semantic interoperability. He implemented and maintained ISOCAT, the ISO TC37 registry selected by CLARIN to achieve semantic interoperability. He created and experimented with various extensions to overcome limitations of ISOCAT, among which the SCHEMACat schema registry and the RELCat Relation Registry. When ISOCAT was abandoned by CLARIN around 2014, it was replaced by the CLARIN Concept Registry ( ). Menzo further developed CCR and provided a lot of support to the CLARIN CCR Coordinators and others with respect to this registry. 

Menzo has also played an important role in the area of Component Metadata ( ), the approach to metadata adopted in CLARIN. He was involved in the development of CMDI 1.x and gave support for it, and he especially created the CMDI 1.x toolkit since 2011. He also developed and supported the CMDI Core Model for Web Services since 2012 and the CLARIN OAI harvester manager and viewer (since 2013). He developed (with Matej Ďurčo) and supports CMD2RDF, a tool to convert CMDI metadata to linked data in RDF format since 2014. He also made significant contributions to the CLAVAS Vocabulary Registry and provides support for it since 2015. He is since 2015 Co-chair of the CMDI Taskforce, which created the technical specification of CMDI 1.2 and now works on a Best Practices Guide together with the Metadata Curation Taskforce. 

Menzo also made several contributions to authentication issues. Since 2013, he carried out experiments (which are still ongoing) around proper delegation in the context of /Shibboleth and Web Services. Finally, Menzo contributed to the development of and support for TLA-FLAT, a CLARIN compatible repository solution (since 2014). 

Menzo is a member of the CLARIN Standards committee since 2012 and is Co-chair of the CMDI Taskforce since 2015. 

Apart from his technical work, he has disseminated his ideas and results in a wide range of presentations and publications (>40 publications and >55 presentations). He has organized multiple workshops and tutorials (15) to make the CLARIN community acquainted with ISOCAT, CCR, CMDI, and other products that he contributed to.

Based on our personal experiences in working with Menzo, we have observed that Menzo is exceptionally responsive and helpful whenever a question arises on technical issues around CMDI metadata, semantic interoperability or other technical matters: He responds fast, and very much to the point, and clearly shows excellent knowledge and expertise in these domains. In addition, he is a very nice guy to work with and extremely friendly. 

Given all this evidence, we submit that CLARIN has benefitted exceptionally from Menzo’s contributions, and that it can truly be stated that Menzo made outstanding contributions toward 

CLARIN goals in the areas of language resource building, tool or service development, exemplary use cases, user involvement or knowledge sharing, and therefore we nominate Menzo Windhouwer for the Steven Krauwer Award 2018, in the category CLARIN Achievement. 


The 6th edition of the award ceremony took place at the annual CLARIN Annual Conference in Leipzig, Germany.

The awards, named in honor of Steven Krauwer (the first executive director of CLARIN ) are given annually to outstanding scientists or engineers in recognition of outstanding contributions toward CLARIN goals in the areas of language resource building, tool or service development, exemplary use cases, user involvement or knowledge sharing. Apart from the honour the winners receive an official certifcate.

An overview of all the winners can be found here.