CLARIN Centers for a Sustainable Infrastructure

1. CLARIN Centers for a Sustainable Infrastructure Daan Broeder, MPI for Psycholinguistics Jan Odijk, Utrecht University

2. Content • The Problem: Stable Services in a Dynamic World • CLARIN foundations: we have a center based solution • CLARIN Centers, how is that working out? • Adjustments required? • Recommendations

3. CLARIN centers From the start centers played an important role in the services infrastructure architecture planning “a backbone of CLARIN centers” is a phrase that is often found in the early documents. Fundamental: many centers are sharing responsibility Strategy: • Explicit responsibility for services • Explicit contact point Centers can gain exposure: • Explicit acknowledgement after assessment of: • Organizational aspects (DSA) • Technical competence (services)

4. Center variety • Originally CLARIN centers are mainly research institutes, and university departments • … many differences both in research focus and size • The first national projects were CLARIN-D and NL with ample means and many candidate centers • … some competition was not thought as evil • In some other disciplines a single or a few centers are dominant in research infrastructures • Which depending on their funding situation can make the infrastructure very vulnerable • However “single/few center infrastructure” is a valid approach

5. Center Taxonomy Assessment K R E C B A L PIDs AAI service FIM CMDI Center Registry DSA PID service ISOCat VCregistry CMDIRegistry VLO

6. Center infra evolution • Newer national CLARIN projects often have one single CLARIN center that is supported by several partners and serves the whole community • Consequence of smaller budget (compared with NL and D) • … or a smart way to save money? • One CLARIN center costs less and can represent many interests or organizations • However, is this stable? • ‘New’ trend: inclusion of broad data centers, libraries, … • Libraries participating in the core (No) … or still in the periphery (NL)

7. CLARIN Services sustainability • CLARIN services are not the core business for research institutes (and certainly not of general data centers) • Usually funded from the national project • … vulnerable for funding changes • Offering services and data should be seen as a important and funded from beyond CLARIN • … or better: services should be anchored in an institute’s own workflow • Nevertheless all may fail • So centers should accept take over services from others • Essential services can be doubled

8. How vulnerable are we? • Center downscaling • MPI has reconsidered its project strategy • A-services must be relocated • Loss of expert staff • Funding gaps • Research strategy changes

9. We need an Elastic Infrastructure What does that mean in a European context? • No dependence on a single national project • Certainly not dependent on one or a few centers • Coordinating parties are able to compensate for shrinking or disappearing centers • By: • Enable moving services to other centers (and test this) • Doubling of essential A-services • Enable easy outsourcing of services to compute (E-)centers • Fund software maintainers & developers and reserve adequate resources on national & EU level • Flag requirements to national & EU funders

10. Still need stable lynch-pins I • Assumption of long-term well funded stable research-institutes is perhaps not tenable • What is well-funded, stable and sustainable? • New developments as general data-centers, e-science organizations, EU data management infra projects etc. • Problems: too general approaches, motivation • Service specificity can be (partly) solved by • Careful integration of the specific with the general by modular policy based services. Will need some extra (shared) costs • Would mean CLARIN as a front-office for a general service provider

11. Still need stable lynch-pins II • libraries and national archives are attractive partners • These are obviously also getting their share of the national budgets • Nobody questions their sustainability • Problems: motivation, (old fashioned) practices, too general approaches. • Motivation will be solved e.g. libraries need to reposition themselves • Results vary per country countries, but in some libraries are already a core part of CLARIN national projects • Can expect the need for libraries to reposition will lead touseful modern data management practices • Service specificity could be (partly) solved by CLARIN (and others) collaborating and even partly integrating with them

12. Summing up to ‘Easy’ Recommendations • A CLARIN center should: • make providing (CLARIN compatible) services and data part of its mission • use those also for the center’s own research workflow • A-services must be built from the start with easy relocation in mind (and this should be tested) • Reserve adequate resources for outsourcing of services and funding of service development • Include broader multi-disciplinary institutes & service providers and see how to integrate with them • Starting with libraries and data centers & DM projects • Develop models in collaboration for building discipline specific services on top of general ones

13. Thank You for your attention