GermaNet is a large lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns, verbs, and adjectives semantically. The word net has been manually constructed over the last 25 years and hence presents a high-quality, valuable resource for German. While GermaNet is maintained in a Postgres database, all its content can be exported as an XML-based serialisation. Recently, this XML representation has been converted into RDF, largely by staying close to GermaNet’s principle of arrangement where lexunits that share the same meaning are grouped together into so-called synsets. With each lexical unit and synset now globally addressable via a unique resource identifier, it has become much easier to link together GermaNet entries with other lexical and semantic resources. In terms of semantic interoperability, however, the RDF variant of GermaNet leaves much to be desired. In this paper, we describe yet another conversion from GermaNet’s XML representation to RDF. The new conversion makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon ontology, and therefore, presents a decisive step toward a GermaNet representation with a much higher level of semantic interoperability, and which makes it possible to use GermaNet with other wordnets that already support this conceptualisation of lexica.

This paper presents the system architecture as well as the underlying workflow of the Extensible Repository System of Digital Objects (ERDO) which has been developed for the sustainable archiving of language resources within the Tübingen CLARIN-D project. In contrast to other approaches focusing on archiving experts, the described workflow can be used by researchers without required knowledge in the field of long-term storage for transferring data from their local file systems into a persistent repository.

eScience - enhanced science - is a new paradigm of scientific work and research. In the humanities, eScience environments can be helpful in establishing new workflows and lifecycles of scientific data. WebLicht is such an eScience environment for linguistic analysis, making linguistic tools and resources available network-wide. Today, most digital language resources and tools (LRT) are available by download only. This is inconvenient for someone who wants to use and combine several tools because these tools are normally not compatible with each other. To overcome this restriction, WebLicht makes the functionality of linguistic tools and the resources themselves available via the internet as web services. In WebLicht, several kinds of linguistic tools are available which cover the basic functionality of automatic and incremental creation of annotated text corpora. To make use of the more than 70 tools and resources currently available, the end user needs nothing more than just a common web browser.

We present a web service-based environment for the use of linguistic resources and tools to address issues of terminology and language varieties. We discuss the architecture, corpus representation formats, components and a chainer supporting the combination of tools into task-specific services. Integrated into this environment, single web services also become part of complex scenarios for web service use. Our web services take for example corpora of several million words as an input on which they perform preprocessing, such as tokenisation, tagging, lemmatisation and parsing, and corpus exploration, such as collocation extraction and corpus comparison. Here we present an example on extraction of single and multiword items typical of a specific domain or typical of a regional variety of German. We also give a critical review on needs and available functions from a user's point of view. The work presented here is part of ongoing experimentation in the D-SPIN project, the German national counterpart of CLARIN.