CLARIN is a pan-European research infrastructure that was initiated from the vision that all digital language resources and tools from all over Europe and beyond are accessible through an online environment for the support of researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
The CLARIN infrastructure is organized as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) since 2012 and it is included in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) since 2016.
CLARIN's mission is: Create and maintain an infrastructure to support the sharing, use and sustainability of language data and tools for research in the humanities and social sciences.
The CLARIN infrastructure:
1. Supports the sharing, the use and the sustainability of digital language data: Resource families
2. Offers advanced tools to explore, further exploit and analyze such data sets: Tools
3. Gives access to top level expertise in language sciences: Knowledge infrastructure
4. Provides funding opportunities for projects, workshops, trainings, mobility grants and summer schools that are addressing a topic that is in line with one or more of CLARIN's aims: Funding
CLARIN’s data registries and data management services are based on the FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. As such, data and tools from different centers are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform complex operations to support researchers in their work.
CLARIN is composed of a networked federation of centers, which may be language service providing centers (B-centers) or knowledge centers (K-centers). The CLARIN centers are listed on the following pages:
All the members of the academic community in all participating countries have access to data and tools with single sign-on access.
Currently, 24 countries are full members, 2 are participating as Observers of CLARIN (among which Switzerland) and 1 as third party. CLARIN-CH is preparing to become a full member of CLARIN ERIC in 2025.