The issue for CLARIN archives at the metadata level is to facilitate the user’s possibility to describe their data, even with their own standard, and at the same time make these metadata meaningful for a variety of users with a variety of resource types, and ensure that the metadata are useful for search across all resources both at the national and at the European level. We see that different people from different research communities fill in the metadata in different ways even though the metadata was defined and documented. This has impacted when the metadata are harvested and displayed in different environments. A loss of information is at stake. In this paper we view the challenges of ensuring metadata interoperability through examples of propagation of metadata values from the CLARIN-DK archive to the VLO. We see that the CLARIN Community in many ways support interoperability, but argue that agreeing upon standards, making clear definitions of the semantics of the metadata and their content is inevitable for the interoperability to work successfully. The key points are clear and freely available definitions, accessible documentation and easily usable facilities and guidelines for the metadata creators.

This paper presents the challenges and issues encountered in the conversion of TEI header metadata into the CMDI format. The work is carried out in the Danish research infrastructure, CLARIN-DK, in order to enable the exchange of language resources nationally as well as internationally, in particular with other partners of CLARIN ERIC. The paper describes the task of converting an existing TEI specification applied to all the text resources deposited in DK-CLARIN. During the task we have tried to reuse and share CMDI profiles and components in the CLARIN Component Registry, as well as linking the CMDI components and elements to the relevant data categories in the ISOcat Data Category Registry. The conversion of the existing metadata into the CMDI format turned out not to be a trivial task and the experience and insights gained from this work have resulted in a proposal for a work flow for future use. We also present a core TEI header metadata set.

In this paper, we present the architecture of a distributed resource repository developed for collecting training data for building customized statistical machine translation systems. The repository is designed for the cloud-based translation service integrated in the Let'sMT! platform which is about to be launched to the public. The system includes important features such as automatic import and alignment of textual documents in a variety of formats, a flexible database for meta-information using modern key-value stores and a grid-based backend for running off-line processes. The entire system is very modular and supports highly distributed setups to enable a maximum of flexibility and scalability. The system uses secure connections and includes an effective permission management to ensure data integrity. In this paper, we also take a closer look at the task of sentence alignment. The process of alignment is extremely important for the success of translation models trained on the platform. Alignment decisions significantly influence the quality of SMT engines.

The META-NORD project has contributed to an open infrastructure for language resources (data and tools) under the META-NET umbrella. This paper presents the key objectives of META-NORD and reports on the results achieved in the first year of the project. META-NORD has mapped and described the national language technology landscape in the Nordic and Baltic countries in terms of language use, language technology and resources, main actors in the academy, industry, government and society; identified and collected the first batch of language resources in the Nordic and Baltic countries; documented, processed, linked, and upgraded the identified language resources to agreed standards and guidelines. The three horizontal multilingual actions in META-NORD are overviewed in this paper: linking and validating Nordic and Baltic wordnets, the harmonisation of multilingual Nordic and Baltic treebanks, and consolidating multilingual terminology resources across European countries. This paper also touches upon intellectual property rights for the sharing of language resources.

The MULINCO project (MUltiLINgual Corpus of the University of Copenhagen) started early 2005. The purpose of this cross-disciplinary project is to create a corpus platform for education and research in monolingual and translation studies. The project covers two main types of corpus texts: literary and non-literary. The platform is being developed using available tools as far as possible, and integrating them in a very open architecture. In this paper we describe the current status and future developments of both the text and tool side of the corpus platform, and we show some examples of student exercises taking advantage of tagged and aligned texts.