Welcome to the Clarin Centers Prague Meeting, Nov. 5-6 2009
News
Oct. 4, 2009: Preliminary program and information about venues posted, registration open.
Sep 24, 2009: Webpage created
About the Meeting
Most recent discussions about infrastructures at the e-IRG and EGEE conferences and the documents from ESFRI and e-IRG about Data Management confirmed the importance of our CLARIN discussions about the great relevance of a network of strong service centres as the backbone for giving stable services to the user community. In particular the interactions with the colleagues from EGEE and DEISA at the NEERI conference opened our eyes for the requirements for centres as they are discussed in other areas of sciences for example.
By offering services that can easily be integrated in the research workflow, these service centres are in many ways essential for the future e-Research scenario since they will (1) give stable services, (2) run and maintain the infrastructure, (3) host resources on behalf of researchers, (4) provide web-based services on behalf of a network of language processing tool providers, (5) represent the structured LRT community to the horizontal e-Infrastructure initiatives, (6) push forward encoding standards and best practices, (7) offer training courses and support and (8) adopt and promote best practises and standards for the development of high-quality resources and services (data and resource quality management). While service centres may specialize on particular types of resources and services, all centres have to meet stringent criteria of providing sustainable services. All of this needs to be carried out in close collaboration with the user community and needs to follow the principles of competition to cater for innovation.
In particular, when we look at the emerging research infrastructure in the natural sciences, we understand better what it means to become a centre in a research infrastructure scenario. We need to step away from the "old" type of centres that offer a closed-shop kind of business model and often seem to have their own agenda moving them away from the researchers. Often the result is that everyone is criticizing inconveniences of services, bureaucracy, inflexibility etc.
We need new types of centres
- that take over responsibility for adequate services supporting the researchers in their workflows
- that adapt their service portfolio based on regular feedback from the research community to ensure that the services offered by the centre are based on actual research needs
- that are accountable to the research community by explicit service agreements.
Within CLARIN we addressed the role of centres very clearly from the beginning. This resulted in a broadly discussed requirements document. We also had a call for centres some months ago resulting in about 25 candidates. With all candidates fair discussions took place to come to a first assessment of the state and plans for the future. Also we started a first small pilot for a small federation which needs to be established and then be extended quickly. Therefore we need a follow up workshop on the centre issues to assess what has been done so far and what will be the next steps.
Summarizing all aspects the Prague workshop will be another very important event in the CLARIN preparatory phase. I am sure that our colleagues from Prague hosting the event will take care that our meeting will happen in an excellent and inspiring atmosphere.
Peter Wittenburg
