These CLARIN newsletters date from the preparatory phase (2008-2011) and are kept here for reference. If you want to learn more about CLARIN today, please subscribe to the CLARIN newsflash.
The time has passed as a blink of an eye and we arrived at the end of the preparatory phase of CLARIN. Synchronously with this end, our CLARIN Newsletter comes to an end. This is the last issue — one more than planned, to cover the extenssion of the project until June 2011. It was an extremelly dense period, with a lot of achievements but which has raised also many challenges for the future. Of central importance these days is the process of establishing the CLARIN . The front page is telling this story, through the keyboard of Richard Derksen who has been deeply involved in the establishing the first ever ERIC – SHARE. Since the moment this article was written until today, very good news arrived and we felt they should be given to you as they were transferred to the CLARIN community by the coordinator. So, read the Breaking News!
We have invited Steve Brewer to write about the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and its connections to CLARIN. It is shown how new services, such as those being developed within CLARIN, can be deployed on resources integrated into the EGI framework. Two organisations sharing many goals in common, CLARIN and DARIAH, are expected to sign soon a letter of intend for cooperation with EGI, which we reproduce here.
In the middle pages we have an exclusive insight into the fresh policy paper on in Humanities from the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation.
News from countries/regions at the dawn of the CLARIN ERIC are also hosted in this issue. The Netherlands are clearly the country which had the most outstanding contribution in the configuration of CLARIN and its shaping towards a CLARIN ERIC. Jan Odijk brings in his own experience in convincing his government to put up a CLARIN organisation and training activities that were developed during the last few years in Latvia (one of the countries that signed the MoU for CLARIN ERIC). The particularly significant implication of Portugal, among all the CLARIN members, in aquiring the objectives of the project is stressed by António Branco and Amália Mendes. Then, Ineke Schuurman explains the work done by CLARIN-Vlaanderen in collaboration with the Netherlands in order to satisfy some of the desiderata of HSS-researchers in Flanders. Finally, Dan Cristea and Gabriela Haja present an important achievement for speakers of Romanian language: the electronic form of the Thesaurus Dictionary of Romanian – an important lexicographic resource, machine readable, that is expected to be handed to SSH researchers very soon.
Enjoy your reading of this Newsletter one last time!
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This double issue of CLARIN Newsletter was, according to the original project plan, intended to be the last one. It was our intention to have two separate issues, number 11 at the end of 2010 and number 12 that would herald 2011, and document the six-month extension of project.
Due to a series of unexpected events, it turned out that our initial editorial plan had to be adjusted, so you have in front of you the double issue 11-12 that covers the planned period by dates, but certainly not by the time of its appearance.
Therefore we decided that CLARIN project, its consortium partners and the community that has built around them in previous three years deserve a proper final and closing issue. Issue number 13 will pave the way to the CLARIN infrastructure in its full form.
How CLARIN is perceived from the other side of Atlantic is the topic of the front page contribution by Brian MacWhinney. The Memorandum of Understanding between CLARIN and META-NET documents how the language technology scene, after some time, is working to connect together the relevant initiatives. We publish it in its entirety because we believe this gives the long awaited opportunity to the community to coordinate its efforts at large.
Peter Wittenburg presents several possible offspring of the projects CLARIN and DARIAH within the new call for research infrastructure projects. We will certainly hear more about them in the issue to come. One of the most notable use cases of usage of language resources and technologies ( ) in the Humanities is the CLARIN-supported project on the analysis of folk tales is presented by Piroska Lendvai and Thierry Declerck. This topic has been presented at several digital humanities conferences, and has attracted increasing interest.
The combination of textual and geographical analysis of 17th century manuscript of the Romanian traveller Nicolae Milescu's Iter in Chinam, is another case that clearly shows how digital humanities depend on LRT but also how LRT has to be combined with other types of information.
Our middle pages are oriented, as usual, to the presentation of important events connected to CLARIN. First we have the report by Hetty Winkel from SDH-NEERI 2010 conference that took place in Vienna in October and is the major event jointly organized by CLARIN and DARIAH. It is followed by reports from two LRT conferences that embraced Europe from two sides, South-East and North. These are Formal Approaches to South-Slavic and Balkan Languages (FASSBL7) and the fourth Baltic HLT conference. These two show how LT has spread accros the Europe and is growing mature at the regional and not just national level.
The first META-FORUM is presented by Aljoscha Burchardt and Georg Rehm, since after the LREC2010 conference, it has been the LRT event in Europe that collected the largest number of participants.
Our issues regularly end with reports on the status of language resources and technologies from different European countries. We are bringing you the reports from four countries in this double issue: Israel, Iceland, Turkey and Slovakia. Each of them depicts a different situation and varying levels of development of LRT, but what can be noticed is that all these efforts are oriented to a common goal. If we contributed so far to this common goal with our editorial work on the previous issues of CLARIN Newsletter, we certainly hope that we did not disappoint you with this one either.
Enjoy your reading!
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It seems that, as we approach the end of the project, the agenda of CLARIN-related activities and events becomes more and more heavy. If you go through this double issue, even from the tip of the finger, you will be surprised to see how many important things has happened from the beginning of this year, and at what speed we are moving forward. In the following we will browse for you the content of this CLARIN Newsletter, the double issue 9-10, not necessarily in the order the articles are included.
First, we are happy to bring to the CLARIN readers a word from the very heart of the European Commission, there where the strategic decisions are being taken in Language Technology. Kimmo Rossi is giving the fresh and very welcome news of a hot autumn and winter: very generous calls of the ICT Work Programme are waiting for us behind a door that we are invited to open and 2011-2012 will bring even more amazing initiatives.
Then, we announce new launches of programmes, projects and collaborations. In Nederlands, the CLARIN-NL Project has received an extremely generous financing, which could be taken as an example by many CLARIN member states, news offered to us by Jan Odijk. António Branco and Marko Tadić relate about the recent launch of the Portuguese CLARIN in Lisbon. The same António, together with Vera Lúcia Strube de Lima, Thiago Pardo and Steven Krawer, describe, from the position of principal actors, another important event involving the Portuguese language, the PROPOR conference, which can be seen as initiating a promising collaboration of CLARIN on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brasil. From Kaunas, we hear the voice of Rūta Marcinkevičienė, bringing to the CLARIN community news from Lithuania, the new member of CLARIN, and its remarkable progresses in HLT.
Then, as in all our previous issues, a series of articles relate about CLARIN activities. The new face and functionalities of the CLARIN website are commented by Corina Dima, its main implementer (WP6). Ville Oksanen, Krister Lindén and Hanna Westerlund, a Finish team (WP8), present the principal LRs distribution licenses standardized within the project. And the state of the art in speech technologies and how are they related to language learning CALL systems, as possible part of the CLARIN infrastructure, is contributed by Catia Cucchiarini.
Finally, a number of articles present the main LR&T events in Europe within the last few months. The LREC series of conferences, due to a rich heritage and an almost perfect conceptualization and organization, has become one of the major global events of our community, attended now by 1,246 registered participants at the main conference and workshops. Less known, perhaps even funny, stories from the recent Malta event are brought forward by the chair of the local organization committee, Mike Rosner, while the conference main chair, Nicoletta Calzolari, together with Claudia Soria and Riccardo Del Gratta, describe one of the most important side effects of the Malta LREC – the LRT Map. A great idea, which, will certainly have important consequences in the making of a global thesaurus of language resources and tools. Then, the already significant CICLing, held this year for the first time in Europe, in Iaşi, is presented by its very inventor, Alexander Gelbukh, and the principal local organizer, Corina Forăscu. One of the most important CLARIN meetings since the beginning of the project was the join gathering of its boards, which included the Executive Board, the Scientific Board, the Strategic Coordination Board and the International Advisory Board. The coordinator of the project, Steven Krauwer, is giving a short presentation, with a stress on the advances towards establishing the CLARIN ERIC, the new framework under which the project will function starting with the construction phase. You will find a word, then, on the recent join meeting of CLARIN and FLaReNet in Stockholm, by Rolf Carlson, Kjell Elenius and David House. The discussions focused on speech and multimodality, as well as on the best practices that would enable to integrate tools and to achieve uniformity in annotation. You can find also a very short survey of the LT Days that took place in Luxembourg, reported by Marko Tadić. Enjoy reading it! We would be happy to know your opinion, your news, your suggestions. Write us! Download the PDF version of this issue of the CLARIN Newsletter.
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Welcome, dear readers, to the issue of CLARIN Newsletter that closes the second year of our preparatory phase. Looking back to the initial, preliminary and preparatory meetings from three years ago it would be hard to imagine that our idea of research infrastructure for humanities and social sciences will start to shape up so soon. CLARIN started to attract interest from other related fields, but also from the direction of top level scientists who are involved in strategic planning and directing the science policy in Europe today. One of such figures is certainly John Wood, chair of the Board who made a contribution to our front page reminding us of the tedious and not always straightforward process of discussing and accepting RI proposals that passed filtering.
Other contributions in this issue also reflect the stage of the project we are in at the moment: the planning is well advanced, the first Startup Federation of Service Providers is being built and Kirster Lindér has report on that recent development.
The monumental digitisation project Monumenta Linguae Dacoromanorum: The 1688 Bible Project is presented by Gabriela Haja and Emil Munteanu. This project clearly shows how LR&T in humanities could provide the necessary shift in research paradigme thus leading to the e-Humanities in the proper sense.
This time the central part of the Newsletter is reserved for NEERI Manifesto which clearly requests that copyrighted material should be freely available for research purpuses in the Information Society and Knowledge Economy which we are both facing.
RI without knowledgeable users serves no purpose, so CLARINers soon realised that another project dealing with training users and maintainers of CLARIN RI is needed. The start of this project named is described in a contribution by Koenraad de Smedt.
Our traditional report on national CLARIN and LR&T situation this time comes from Hungary and from the keyboard of Tamás Váradi.
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We offer the honour to open the issue this time to Bente Maegaard and Steven Krauwer, because we want to emphasize the significant activity that was recently pursued inside our community towards the creation of a legal form to the CLARIN entity. The newly framework approved by the Commission to support research infrastructures related activities is called ERIC and this is what we are heading towards, with an application that has to be submitted in the middle of 2010. Research infrastructures in linguistics seem to develop widely, not only in Europe, and a signal from USA is brought by Koenraad de Smedt. He reports on the Cyberlink 2009 workshop, held recently at the start of cyberinfrastructure – the American term for research infrastructures – project at UC Berkeley.
Then, continuing our tradition of presenting a research in domains that need the help of CLARIN, Hanne Fersøe offers a very interesting article on a consortium project studying hearing loss, showing how sound and language technologies could feed advanced techniques intended to develop hearing aid devices.
The central pages of the issue, as always intended to present recent important CLARIN events, are contributed by Peter Wittenburg, Antti Arppe, Pirjoleanna Forsstrom and Nicoletta Calzolari. NEERI, the Networking Event for European Research Infrastructures + Standards was organised by CLARIN and hosted by the University of Helsinki, in September this year. By its attendance and the diversity of themes approached (among which: long-term preservation, persistent identifiers, metadata frameworks, semantic interoperability, grid computing and federation technologies used in CLARIN, ethical and legal issues) this workshop configured as one of the most significant events organised by CLARIN since its inception.
We wanted to host in this Newsletter a presentation of one traditional event, that grew in significance over the years, due to the attentive selection of the hot topics of this so rapidly developing field, the quality of the papers presented and the inspired association with a number of workshops: the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. So we invited two of its main organisers, Galia Angelova and Ruslan Mitkov, to author an article describing this September event, held in Borovets, Bulgaria.
Then, Felix Sasaki signs a short article bringing into attention a major topic of interest for the infrastructure that we want to build: the standards to support the diversity of languages, and the language identification software that will have to bridge the language resource information and the Web information space.
And finally, dear reader, you will find a report, written by Ineke Shuurman, on the activities developed by CLARIN-Vlaanderen on the Dutch language, spoken essentially in the northern part of Belgium, Flanders, and partly in Brussels.
Enjoy your reading!
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We offer this issue to our readers at the half way of our project. It’s time to count some eggs, sure not yet the ducklings… This was indeed what Peter Wittenburg had in mind when writing the opening article.
Because CLARIN has become well known, in Europe at least, many people started to become nervous. Those inside the community, as they want to show to the world already some results (which would diminish somehow a certain amount of grumpy gossips about an expensive community doing nothing but travelling), and those outside the community, eager to consume what we have promised. At the half time break (before summer) Peter addresses 5 thoughts to 5 distinct communities. We continue with two articles that present evaluation results of the two calls issued this year: the one addressing collaboration with HSS projects, article contributed by Tamás Váradi and Koenraad de Smedt, and the usage scenarios call – an article written by Valeria Quochi. As you will see, 3 and, respectively, 4 winners have been preselected in these two contests. And the game has only begun, because CLARIN will have now to prove that it can provide a kind of CLARIN-grounded workflow as solution in all cases. The middle pages, as well as the next one, are dedicated to the very important Consortium meeting that took place in Barcelona in the second decade of May. We have invited Carla Parra and Eva Revilla, members of the host organisation – Universitat Pompeu Fabra, to make a general presentation of this extremely well organised event. Then, Frank Binder and Dan Cristea describe the training and dissemination session, in which both of us (Dan and Marko) together with 5 other colleagues have been actively involved. Although not financed in this preparatory phase, training will become a big issue in the construction and exploitation phase and therefore merits already a vivid attention. Dieter Van Uytvanck signs two articles on page 9, the first one alone – announcing the launching of the attractively interesting Virtual Language Observatory ( ), an MPI achievement, and the second one, together with his colleague Florian Wittenburg – presenting briefly the Research Connection event in Prague, at the beginning of May. The last two articles bring into focus activities in LRT performed by an European agency and at a national level. In what way ELRA – the already 14 years old well-known association – connects to CLARIN and why such a marriage is fortunate is commented by Victoria Arranz and Khalid Choukri. Finally, Svetla Koeva presents the Bulgarian LRT sector, including research and teaching performed in universities, state institutes and in the private sector. Enjoy the reading! Download the PDF version of this issue of the CLARIN Newsletter.
More than the whole year has passed since our project has started. It may seem that it passed too quickly, but if we turn around and count all consortium meetings, workshops, dedicated thematic and technical meetings at the level or the whole CLARIN project only, I am confident that we can be satisfied by their number. In that respect, we have already achieved a remarkable set of goals, but we are not even in the middle of our first, preparatory and planning phase of the whole CLARIN infrastructure. The retrospect of our first year and prospect for the following two years is the topic of this number’s title page, written by the author who is certainly the most appropriate for that — Steven Krauwer, our coordinator. His ability to put in concise yet perfectly understandable way topics that usually demand several pages to be explained is always striking. In this contribution he also gave us a warm push in the back that is always needed in order to finish our job properly. Our initial editorial intention for this issue was to organise it around the report on selected humanities project that would exemplify the potential and role of LRT in humanities research (one of primary tasks of WP3). Due to the change in schedule in that working package, this original idea had to be abandoned. Instead, we are covering a broad range of different events organized as thematic or national meetings. The first one is an expert meeting on metadata (presented by Peter Wittenburg, Maria Gavrilidou and Erhard Hinrichs) where this topic of utmost importance for building the federation of different e-archives was tackled. The establishing of CLARIN-CAT, the Catalan offspring of the CLARIN project in the form of round tables is covered by the contribution by Eva Revilla from University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. The report from the FLaReNet Launching Event that took place in Vienna is presented by Marko Tadić. The FLaReNet project is closely related to CLARIN so we should keep an eye on it constantly, particularly having in mind that both of project share a great deal of participants. The central part of this issue, pages six and seven, are covered with the thorough report from the WP2/WP5 three day workshop held in Oxford from the keyboard of Dieter van Uytvanck. In this workshop some relevant problems were presented and important decisions were made and it is certainly worthwhile to get acquainted with them. The following pages are covered by our national correspondents. They are either presenting a particular case-studies, like the project INQ1258 from Portugal (page eight), or they are presenting a situation and development in the field of LRT in different countries. Thus on page nine we have a brief description of many activities in Sweden, covering main LR projects/institutions that will play a crucial role once the CLARIN infrastructure will be established. On page ten you can read about the situation in France and which institutions are involved in LRT production. The development of Latvian CLARIN, its prospects for national funding and first national seminar is given on page eleven. We hope that you will, as always, enjoy the reading of this newsletter. Download the PDF version of this issue of the CLARIN Newsletter.
At the end of the first year of the project, it seems to us that CLARIN has passed the maturity exam and is already on the lips of every builder of LT resources or tools in Europe. It is perhaps less known among the “consumers of LT”, which gives us a good hint about an area in which progress is clearly wanted. The central topic in this issue is the new calls of interest for CLARINers. Indeed, these very days, new calls for research, have been launched in Europe, and we wanted to offer to our readers a short guide, seen through CLARIN eyes, to help you orientate through the calls, understand their philosophy, and prepare the making of consortia for applications. With this context in mind, we have invited the Scientific Board member Dan Tufis , to open the issue by presenting the EC research horizon, as it is reflected in the new i2010 policy framework. Then, as CLARIN itself launches a call for collaboration with colleagues from the humanities and social sciences, we have asked Koenraad de Smedt and Tamás Váradi to comment on the context of this call. The text of the call is also included. Closely connected to this call is how to show HSS researchers the advantages that they can gain from CLARIN in their daily research activities. A great challenge of the CLARIN preparatory phase is the definition of representative usage scenarios. This CLARIN activity, which is under development right now, is presented by Valeria Quochi, Lothar Lemnitzer and Marc Kemp-Snijders. The space in the middle of the issue is, as usual, dedicated to new events which are considered important from the CLARIN perspective. Two very successful workshops organised by the end of 2008 and a European-level meeting, which happened in January 2009, occupy this space. The workshop organised by CLARIN as a WP2/WP5 joint event in October is commented on by Erhard Hinrichs and Peter Wittenburg, the D-Spin-CLARIN joint Workshop in Munich is illustrated by Núria Bel and Marc Kemp-Snijders, while Marko Tadić describes the Language Technology Days in Luxembourg. Finally, the last several pages are reserved for reports by collaborators from CLARIN partners that bring the news from their countries. In this issue these are Hanne Fersøe, who is commenting the Danish CLARIN project, Eva Hajičová, giving a report on the Czech NLP tradition and horizon, and Dan Cristea, presenting the state-of-the-art in LRT in Romania. Enjoy the reading.
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As we all entered into a second half of CLARIN's first year, we felt that several key issues had to be presented at this point of our project. The first one is comparison, correspondence and relations with infrastructure building initiatives and projects similar to CLARIN. Nicoletta Calzolari is covering this topic on the front page because we believe that we can learn from others as well as others are learning from us. The second important topic – covered by Steven Krauwer and Bente Maegaard in an opening article to this issue – is the role of EC and national funding in the phase where CLARIN currently is i.e. preparatory phase. The list of steps for building up the national CLARIN teams is given thus providing a recipe how to establish firm CLARIN communities at the national level that would easily connect to the European level. This article is clearly demonstrating the priorities and best practices to finish this task. In this issue our regular two-fold contribution, where users and developers share their needs and solutions, covers the topic of endangered languages and the way these language data are recoded, transferred, compressed, archived and used. The contributors on the users' side are Jost Gippert, Sebastian Drude and Peter Wittenburg, while the contribution from the developers’ side is by Florian Wittenburg. The two centerfold pages are devoted to a report (by Tamás Váradi, Marko Tadić, Peter Wittenburg and Peter Tindemans) from an ESF supported workshop of the Alliance for Permanent Access – Keeping the Records of Science Accessible: Can We Afford It? The Alliance for Permanent Access was established to ensure that research data (and not just the publications with the results of research) is freely accessible to other researchers. In this workshop different business models for long-term preservation of research data were presented and discussed. Peter Wittenburg presented CLARIN's idea of federated language archives, and three other members of CLARIN project also attended the workshop. This issue of our Newsletter finishes with a short note by Jan Šnajder about this year ACL that took place in Columbus, Ohio and four important national correspondents’ reports: Mike Rosner from Malta, Koenraad De Smedt from Norway, Montserrat Marimon from Spain and Maciej Piasecki from Poland. Each of them is giving a survey of LRT situation and CLARIN activities in their countries thus shaping up the European landscape that we have started to observe in previous issues of CLARIN Newsletter. We wish you a pleasant reading.
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For many people who attended LREC this year, the magnificent Marrakesh is still extremely alive in memories: with its narrow and crowded streets full of colours and smells, with the snake charmers performing their skills in the open, with the shop owners almost grabbing you to visit their incredible bazaar-like exhibitions, with the bargaining habits reminding that we are already in the middle of Orient although at the Greenwich longitude, with the arabesque of sculptured wood and stone heavily decorating the Muslim palaces, with the romantic riads, the authentic old-style hotels built around inner patios where the tea arrives in the glass after executing a skilful and spectacular vault in the air.
It was there that we decided to distribute a historical, if you allow us to prefigure, first issue of our CLARIN Newsletter, as we wanted to exploit the advantage of having there more than a thousand of participants working in Language Resources and Technologies for putting it directly in their hands. We are glad now to bring to your attention our second issue. You will notice that it respects the same main schema, that we tried to impose as a constant for the CLARIN Newsletter, mainly including minimally a parallel view of developers and consumers, a presentation of major events related to CLARIN, and reports describing recent developments in the CLARIN member states. We have invited Peter Wittenburg to open the issue with a note on a recently set up collaboration between , another important collaborating project that builds research and educational infrastructures, and CLARIN. The reason why we have chosen this as the cover story is that we wanted thus to stress the importance of the interactivity with major pan-European initiatives intended to develop technological infrastructures that will be of help to researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Next to this page you can read in an article by Maria Gavrilidou and Stelios Piperidis about the efforts that are being performed presently in Greece to preserve the cultural heritage and the role that the language resources and technologies play there. The next page, bring the parallel views of consumer and the developer. This time Željko Hodonj from the Croatian News Agency has the contribution which describes how this company plans to use LR&T to further speed up their work-flow and also to make new information-broker products. The developer's view is presented professor Bojana Dalbelo Bašić from Zagreb University. On page 5 Thierry Declerck discusses the topic which brings about the essential issue of standards in LR&T that will be of crucial importance to the CLARIN community. We have selected for review in the middle pages three events that took place recently in Europe. LREC – the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, where at least two meetings with great relevance for CLARIN took place. They are described by Steven Krauwer. Then, the Digital Humanities Conference in Oulu, Finland is reviewed by Martin Wynne, and the ESF workshop on the role of humanities in CEE countries in Sofia, Bulgaria, presented by Marko Tadić. Peter Wittenburg and Tamás Váradi are interviewed by us in an attempt to shed more light on the lively issue of the role of commercial companies in LR&T research in Europe, a topic which they addressed in an article in the previous issue of this newsletter. We felt that we should devote more space to the question of whether we are really in competition with the Internet and software giants. The following articles describe two CLARIN national projects: the German one, as authored by Erhard Hinrichs, Peter Wittenburg, Alexander Geyken, Lothar Lemnitzer and Andreas Witt, and the Danish one, as authored by Hanne Fersøe.
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In your hands you have the first issue of CLARIN Newsletter, a publication initiated and supported by CLARIN — an acronym for the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, which is a combination of collaborative projects and coordination and support actions, registered at the EU under the number FRA-2007-2.2.1.2. This publication is planned to appear 4 times per year, both electronically and on paper, at least for the lifetime of the preparatory activities. The electronic version can be accessed by anyone on the project’s site at www.clarin.eu. On demand, it can be e-mailed to subscribers. The subscription information and forms can be found on the Newsletter section of the CLARIN site. On paper it will be distributed mainly during main language technology and humanities and social sciences events, and only occasionally it will be sent by mail (no budget is put aside for this).
We want this newsletter to be a publication where people can find the latest news on CLARIN advances and where they can tell their experiences or express opinions. The nice thing about CLARIN is that it facilitates scientific collaboration among people that work in domains which were considered until recently as distant as the Earth’s poles. This is the case of humanities and social sciences, on one hand, and computer science, on the other. They will meet in CLARIN for the common enterprise of finding the most appropriate ways in which language resources, whether they are expressed in speech, in text, or multimedia, can be better offered to scientists and to the public at large. In order for this to happen, we invite you to contribute in this Newsletter in two ways: either as a correspondent editor — therefore sending us periodically news from your scientific community, being it your country, your institute or your group, or as an occasional author.
This first issue, of a series which we hope to include 12 of them (the CLARIN preparatory phase extends from January 2008 till December 2010), aims at offering the first contact to scientists with the CLARIN world. You have just turn the page on which Steven Krauwer, the project coordinator, presented the CLARIN mission in the larger context of the ESFRI action. Martin Wynne, who is the port-parole and liaison with the DARIAH project in CLARIN, tries to convince you why a new infrastructure to deal with resources and tools is required by humanists and social scientists. We have dedicated page 4 to two categories of scientists dealing with resources: consumers and producers. In this issue these two voices belong to János László, which brings a motivation for IT needs in social psychology, and Max Silberztein, the developer of the NooJ tool, which was at the very heart of the work reported by János László. The central pages are dedicated to the CLARIN kick-off meeting, hosted by MPI and the Nijmegen City Hall, from 17 to 19 March 2008. Some meetings in which the CLARIN idea took gradually shape are also briefly described. We have thought that many of our readers would like to know in more details the CLARIN structure and how are its activities organized. This is why we have offered the following 4 pages to members of the Executive Board.
First, Peter Wittemburg makes a presentation of the CLARIN organization, and then all coordinators of the CLARIN working packages WP2-WP8, minus WP4 which does not exist, describe their specific activities. The last page, now and in all further issues, is dedicated to a presentation of events, most significant for CLARIN, over a period of 6 months in advance.
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