Federated search: Towards a common search infrastructure

Within scientific institutes there exist many language resources. These resources are often quite specialized and relatively unknown. The current infrastructural initiatives try to tackle this issue by collecting metadata about the resources and establishing centers with stable repositories to ensure the availability of the resources. It would be beneficial if the researcher could, by means of a simple query, determine which resources and which centers contain information useful to his or her research, or even work on a set of distributed resources as a virtual corpus. In this article we propose an architecture for a distributed search environment allowing researchers to perform searches in a set of distributed language resources

Towards automatic quality assessment of component metadata

Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a reposi-tory. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositorie

Semantic Mapping in CLARIN Component Metadata

In recent years, large scale initiatives like CLARIN set out to overcome the notorious heterogeneity of metadata formats in the domain of language resource. The CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure established means for flexible resouce descriptions for the domain of language resources. The Data Category Registry ISOcat and the accompanying Relation Registry foster semantic interoperability within the growing heterogeneous collection of metadata records. This paper describes the CMD Infrastructure focusing on the facilities for semantic mapping, and gives also an overview of the current status in the joint component metadata domain

From CLARIN Component Metadata to Linked Open Data

In the European CLARIN infrastructure a growing number of resources are described with Component Metadata. In this paper we describe a transformation to make this metadata available as linked data. After this first step it becomes possible to connect the CLARIN Component Metadata with other valuable knowledge sources in the Linked Data Cloud

Improvements in the CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure

This article reports about the on-going work on a new version of the metadata framework Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI), central to the CLARIN infrastructure. Version 1.2 introduces a number of important changes based on the experience gathered in the last five years of intensive use of CMDI by the digital humanities community, addressing problems encountered, but also introducing new functionality. Next to the consolidation of the structure of the model and schema sanity, new means for lifecycle management have been introduced aimed at combatting the observed proliferation of components, new mechanism for use of external vocabularies will contribute to more consistent use of controlled values and cues for tools will allow improved presentation of the metadata records to the human users. The feature set has been frozen and approved, and the infrastructure is now entering a transition phase, in which all the tools and data need to be migrated to the new version