About CLARIN-CH
CLARIN-CH is the Swiss national node of CLARIN, the pan-European Common Language Research Infrastructure. It aims to provide Swiss researchers in the humanities and social sciences with access to digital language resources, tools, and services. Furthermore, CLARIN-CH facilitates language-related research by offering technical and organizational support, fostering collaboration, and ensuring the integration of Swiss language resources into the broader European CLARIN network.
To read more about the members of CLARIN-CH, you can visit the following pages:
Swiss Distributed B-centre
A CLARIN B-centre is a fully certified technical and institutional node within the European CLARIN infrastructure. To be awarded B-centre status, an institution must undergo a rigorous assessment procedure to prove it maintains a highly stable technical and institutional foundation that is independently confirmed by CoreTrustSeal Certification. B-centres form the backbone of CLARIN, providing the scientific community with secure, long-term access to specialized language resources, tools, and services.
In Switzerland, our B-centre operates under a unique distributed model. The joint CLARIN B-centre certification was awarded to LaRS (Language Repository of Switzerland) and LiRI (Linguistic Research Infrastructure). Both parties have a highly complementary role within the Swiss linguistic research infrastructure. You can read more about their functions and specializations on the pages about repository and technical centre, respectively. Since repository and technical expertise are the two fundamental requirements for any B-centre, this partnership allows us to fulfill this dual mandate perfectly.
By combining the robust repository infrastructure of LaRS with the diverse technical services of LiRI, the Swiss distributed B-centre aims to cover the whole data lifecycle in a sustainable way in adherence with FAIR principles for all the researchers working with language data in Switzerland.
Organisation
CLARIN-CH is organised around five key entities that together form a robust national research infrastructure:
- CLARIN-CH Consortium of Swiss HEIs − the kernel of the national network
- CLARIN-CH Coordination Office − in charge with the operation of CLARIN-CH and its driving force
- Linguistic Research Infrastructure − the technical data and service providing center
- ZHAW Digital Discourse Lab − providing data, tools and expertise for multilingual discourse analysis
- LaRS@SWISSUbase − the FAIR-compliant national repository
The strong collaboration between these entities ensures Switzerland’s active participation in CLARIN while fostering an ecosystem that supports researchers in managing language data according to Open Science and FAIR principles.
Roadmap
CLARIN-CH is currently on the road to becoming a full member of CLARIN-ERIC. Much has happened since the creation of the CLARIN-CH Consortium in December 2020, such as the creation of our Working Groups, the first national CLARIN-CH Day, which took place in September 2024, and the launch of the new LiRI corpus platform (LCP) in December 2024, to mention only a few examples. We are looking forward to reaching our next milestone soon!
Update: As of May 1, 2025, Switzerland has officially been accepted by the CLARIN General Assembly as member of CLARIN ERIC! We are very happy to have reached the final milestone of our roadmap and to be able to fully participate in the pan-European CLARIN framework from now on. To learn more about CLARIN ERIC, visit this website.
CLARIN-CH Consortium
The consortium agreement has recently been renewed and is now valid from 2025 until 2028: CLARIN-CH consortium agreement
The statutes of CLARIN-CH as well as the current value proposition provide further information on the purpose of CLARIN-CH:
If you would like to stay in the loop about recent developments at CLARIN-CH, our mailing list is the best option. We are also regularly sharing updates and events on LinkedIn, or organizing events like the Update Hour and the CLARIN-CH Day to spread the news and keep our members involved.