CLARIN Knowledge Centres
CLARIN Knowledge Centres (K-centres) are a cornerstone of the CLARIN knowledge infrastructure. K-centres are institutions that have agreed to share their knowledge and expertise on one or more aspects of the domain covered by the CLARIN infrastructure.
The Role of K-Centres
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 CLARIN K-centres also exist elsewhere, and they all have a virtual presence.
Areas of K-Centre Expertise
K-centres all have their own specific areas of expertise, which can belong to many different categories, such as
- Individual languages (e.g. Danish, Czech, Portuguese), language families (e.g. South Slavic) or groups of languages (e.g. morphologically rich languages, the languages of Sweden)
- Written text and modalities other than written text (e.g. spoken language, sign language)
- Linguistic topics (e.g. language diversity, language learning, diachronic studies)
- Language processing topics (e.g. speech analysis, building treebanks, machine translation)
- Data types other than corpora (e.g. lexical data, word nets, terminology banks)
- Using or processing families of language data that will exist for most languages (e.g. newspapers, parliamentary records, oral history)
- Generic methods and issues (e.g. data management, ethics, IPR, OCR)
If you click on the link you will see which of the K-centres offer expertise in that category, and which topics it covers.
Services Offered by K-Centres
Services offered by K-centres can take different shapes. They all have a helpdesk that will respond to requests within two working days. Some offer online courses, some offer best-practice documents, some offer guidance in getting access to and using data and tools, some are willing to host receivers of CLARIN mobility grants, and there are many more models in which the expertise is offered and shared.
Collection of Best-Practice Papers from the CLARIN K-Centres
As part of a new initiative, CLARIN researchers can now access a collection of best-practice papers on various topics in a dedicated folder in the CLARIN Zotero library. All papers referenced on the K-centre pages are reviewed, and those relevant to the general CLARIN community are selected and made publicly available in one place. For convenience, tags are added to the papers (for example, modalities, K-centre names and keywords). The list of papers is an initiative of the Knowledge Infrastructure Committee (KIC), in collaboration with the K-centres, who provide the papers, and the CLARIN Office, who curates the list.
Finding K-Centres
The different categories listed under 'Areas of K-centre expertise' (one of the sections on this page) all link directly to the list of K-centres offering the expertise in that category with a short descriptions. More detailed information can be found on the home pages of the K-centres. Please note that the list of K-centres and themes covered is continuously expanding. To find K-centres that offer the expertise you need please check the following pages:
- The alphabetically ordered list of all K-centres with a summary of the organisational details and the expertise they can offer
- Keyword-based search
- The Tour de CLARIN page with presentations of individual K-centres and interviews with people working there
How to Establish a K-Centre
The following document contains the application form and guidelines for obtaining the status of CLARIN K(nowlegde) Centre:
- Document CE-2014-0419: How to prepare an application to become a recognised CLARIN K-centre
The filled in application form should be submitted by the head of the institution(s) and sent to k-centre-application@clarin.eu. The application will be reviewed by the CLARIN Knowledge Infrastructure Committee (KIC). The Committee will send feed-back or requests for clarification to the applicant, and make its recommendation to the CLARIN Board of Directors.