Dieter Van Uytvanck

Evolving challenges in archiving and data infrastructures

Increasingly often research in the humanities is based on data. This change in attitude and research practice is driven to a large extent by the availability of small and cheap yet high-quality recording equipment (video cameras, audio recorders) as well as advances in information technology (faster networks, larger data storage, larger computation power, suitable software). In some institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, already in the 90s a clear trend towards an all-digital domain could be identified, making use of state-of-the-art technology for research purposes. This change of habits was one of the reasons for the Volkswagen Foundation to establish the DoBeS program in 2000 with a clear focus on language documentation based on recordings as primary material. The fact that more and more data is being collected poses some challenges for those who are dealing with this data in one way or another. The researcher who collects the material will need to maintain a coherent administration of all the relevant bits of contextual information surrounding the data. These “metadata” descriptions (see Section 4.2) are not just for the researchers own use but should also allow others to find the data once it has been stored in an archive and should allow others to assess whether the data suits their needs. Research data archives that are storing more and more large data collections will have to provide proper facilities and guidance for potential users of the data to find what they are looking for. While technological advances have made it much easier to collect large amounts of audiovisual recordings, the automatic extraction of the relevant bits of information from these recordings is still very difficult and therefore needs to be done manually to a large extent. This causes a discrepancy be-

Creating & Testing CLARIN Metadata Components

The CLARIN Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) that is being developed in Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) is a computer-supported framework that combines a flexible component approach with the explicit declaration of semantics. The goal of the Dutch CLARIN project “Creating & Testing CLARIN Metadata Components” was to create metadata components and profiles for a wide variety of existing resources housed at two data centres according to the CMDI specifications. In doing so the principles of the framework were tested. The results of the project are of benefit to other CLARIN-projects that are expected to adhere to the CMDI framework and its accompanying tools.