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The CLARIN Concept Registry (CCR) is the common semantic ground for most CMDI-based profiles to describe language-related resources in the CLARIN universe. While the CCR supports semantic interoperability within this universe, it does not extend beyond it. The flexibility of CMDI, however, allows users to use other term or concept registries when defining their metadata components. In this paper, we describe our use of schema.org, a light ontology used by many parties across disciplines.
Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.
The current state of the art for metadata provision allows for a very flexible approach, catering for the needs of different archives and communities, referring to common data category registries that describe the meaning of a data category at least to authors of metadata. Component models for metadata provisions are for example used by CLARIN and META-SHARE, but there is also an increased flexibility in other metadata schemas such as Dublin Core, which is usually not seen as appropriate for meaningful description of language resources.
Making resources available for others and putting this to a second use in other projects has never been more widely accepted as a sensible efficient way to avoid a waste of efforts and resources. However, when it comes to the details, there is still a vast number of problems. This workshop has aimed at being a forum to address issues and challenges in the concrete work with metadata for LRs, not restricted to a single initiative for archiving LRs. It has allowed for exchange and discussion and we hope that the reader finds the articles here compiled interesting and useful.
This paper describes the ongoing work to integrate WebLicht into the CLARIN infrastructure. It introduces the CLARIN infrastructure for scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as WebLicht - an orchestration and execution environment that is built upon Service Oriented Architecture principles. The integration of WebLicht into the CLARIN infrastructure involves adapting it to the standards and practices used within CLARIN, including distributed repositories, CMDI metadata, and persistent identifiers.
The ISOcat registry reloaded
(2012)
The linguistics community is building a metadata-based infrastructure for the description of its research data and tools. At its core is the ISOcat registry, a collaborative platform to hold a (to be standardized) set of data categories (i.e., field descriptors). Descriptors have definitions in natural language and little explicit interrelations. With the registry growing to many hundred entries, authored by many, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rather informal definitions and their glossary-like design make it hard for users to grasp, exploit and manage the registry’s content. In this paper, we take a large subset of the ISOcat term set and reconstruct from it a tree structure following the footsteps of schema.org. Our ontological re-engineering yields a representation that gives users a hierarchical view of linguistic, metadata-related terminology. The new representation adds to the precision of all definitions by making explicit information which is only implicitly given in the ISOcat registry. It also helps uncovering and addressing potential inconsistencies in term definitions as well as gaps and redundancies in the overall ISOcat term set. The new representation can serve as a complement to the existing ISOcat model, providing additional support for authors and users in browsing, (re-)using, maintaining, and further extending the community’s terminological metadata repertoire.
Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a repository. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositories.
Creating and maintaining metadata for various kinds of resources requires appropriate tools to assist the user. The paper presents the metadata editor ProFormA for the creation and editing of CMDI (Component Metadata Infrastructure) metadata in web forms. This editor supports a number of CMDI profiles currently being provided for different types of resources. Since the editor is based on XForms and server-side processing, users can create and modify CMDI files in their standard browser without the need for further processing. Large parts of ProFormA are implemented as web services in order to reuse them in other contexts and programs.
Linguistics is facing the challenge of many other sciences as it continues to grow into increasingly complex subfields, each with its own separate or overarching branches. While linguists are certainly aware of the overall structure of the research field, they cannot follow all developments other than those of their subfields. It is thus important to help specialists but also newcomers alike to bushwhack through evolved or unknown territory of linguistic data. A considerable amount of research data in linguistics is described with metadata. While studies described and published in archived journals and conference proceedings receive a quite homogeneous set of metadata tags — e.g., author, title, publisher —, this does not hold for the empirical data and analyses that underlie such studies. Moreover, lexicons, grammars, experimental data, and other types of resources come in different forms; and to make things worse, their description in terms of metadata is also not uniform, if existing at all. These problems are well-known and there are now a number of international initiatives — e.g., CLARIN, FlareNet, MetaNet, DARIAH — to build infrastructures for managing linguistic resources. The NaLiDa project, funded by the German Research Foundation, aims at facilitating the management and access to linguistic resources originating from German research institutions. In cooperation with the German SFB 833 research center, we are developing a combination of faceted and full-text search to give integrated access through heterogeneous metadata sets. Our approach is supported by a central registry for metadata field descriptors, and a component repository for structured groups of data categories as larger building blocks.
This paper uses a devil’s advocate position to highlight the benefits of metadata creation for linguistic resources. It provides an overview of the required metadata infrastructure and shows that this infrastructure is in the meantime developed by various projects and hence can be deployed by those working with linguistic resources and archiving. Possible caveats of metadata creation are mentioned starting with user requirements and backgrounds, contribution to academic merits of researchers and standardisation. These are answered with existing technologies and procedures, referring to the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI). CMDI provides an infrastructure and methods for adapting metadata to the requirements of specific classes of resources, using central registries for data categories, and metadata schemas. These registries allow for the definition of metadata schemas per resource type while reusing groups of data categories also used by other schemas. In summary, rules of best practice for the creation of metadata are given.
Wenn man verschiedenartige Forschungsdaten über Metadaten inhaltlich beschreiben möchte, sind bibliografische Angaben allein nicht ausreichend. Vielmehr benötigt man zusätzliche Beschreibungsmittel, die der Natur und Komplexität gegebener Forschungsressourcen Rechnung tragen. Verschiedene Arten von Forschungsdaten bedürfen verschiedener Metadatenprofile, die über gemeinsame Komponenten definiert werden. Solche Forschungsdaten können gesammelt (z.B. über OAI-PMH-Harvesting) und mittels Facetten-basierter Suche über eine einheitliche Schnittstelle exploriert werden. Der beschriebene Anwendungskontext kann über sprachwissenschaftliche Daten hinaus verallgemeinert werden.
The paper’s purpose is to give an overview of the work on the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) that was implemented in the CLARIN research infrastructure. It explains, the underlying schema, the accompanying tools and services. It also describes the status and impact of the CMDI developments done within the CLARIN project and past and future collaborations with other projects.
The Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) in a project on sustainable linguistic resources
(2012)
The sustainable archiving of research data for predefined time spans has become increasingly important to researchers and is stipulated by funding organizations with the obligatory task of being observed by researchers. An important aspect in view of such a sustainable archiving of language resources is the creation of metadata, which can be used for describing, finding and citing resources. In the present paper, these aspects are dealt with from the perspectives of two projects: the German project for Sustainability of Linguistic Data at the University of Tubingen (NaLiDa, cf. http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/nalida) and the Dutch-Flemish HLT Agency hosted at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (TST-Centrale, cf.http://www.inl.nl/tst-centrale). Both projects unfold their approaches to the creation of components and profiles using the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) as underlying metadata schema for resource descriptions, highlighting their experiences as well as advantages and disadvantages in using CMDI.
This paper describes the status of the standardization efforts of a Component Metadata approach for describing Language Resources with metadata. Different linguistic and Language & Technology communities as CLARIN, META-SHARE and NaLiDa use this component approach and see its standardization of as a matter for cooperation that has the possibility to create a large interoperable domain of joint metadata. Starting with an overview of the component metadata approach together with the related semantic interoperability tools and services as the ISOcat data category registry and the relation registry we explain the standardization plan and efforts for component metadata within ISO TC37/SC4. Finally, we present information about uptake and plans of the use of component metadata within the three mentioned linguistic and L&T communities.
XML has been designed for creating structured documents, but the information that is encoded in these structures are, by definition, out of scope for XML. Additional sources, normally not easily interpretable by computers, such as documentation are needed to determine the intention of specific tags in a tag-set. The Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) takes a rather pragmatic approach to foster interoperability between XML instances in the domain of metadata descriptions for language resources. This paper gives an overview of this approach.
The Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) is a framework for the creation and usage of metadata formats to describe all kinds of resources in the CLARIN world. To better connect to the library world, and to allow librarians to enter metadata for linguistic resources into their catalogues, a crosswalk from CMDI-based formats to bibliographic standards is required. The general and rather fluid nature of CMDI, however, makes it hard to map arbitrary CMDI schemas to metadata standards such as Dublin Core (DC) or MARC 21, which have a mature, well-defined and fixed set of field descriptors. In this paper, we address the issue and propose crosswalks between CMDI-based profiles originating from the NaLiDa project and DC and MARC 21, respectively.
The Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) is the dominant framework for describing language resources according to ISO 24622 (ISO/TC 37/SC 4, 2015). Within the CLARIN world, CMDI has become a huge success. The Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) now holds over 800.000 resources, all described with CMDI-based metadata. With the metadata being harvested from about thirty centres, there is a considerable amount of heterogeneity in the data. In part, there is some use of controlled vocabularies to keep data heterogeneity in check, say when describing the type of a resource, or the country the resource is originating from. However, when CMDI data refers to the names of persons or organisations, strings are used in a rather uncontrolled manner. Here, the CMDI community can learn from libraries and archives who maintain standardised lists for all kinds of names. In this paper, we advocate the use of freely available authority files that support the unique identification of persons, organisations, and more. The systematic use of authority records enhances the quality of the metadata, hence improves the faceted browsing experience in the VLO, and also prepares the sharing of CMDI-based metadata with the data in library catalogues.
The Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) provides a lego-brick framework for the creation, use and re-use of self-defined metadata formats. The design of CMDI can be a force forgood, but history shows that it has often been misunderstood or badly executed. Consequently,it has led the community towards the dark ages of metadata clutter rather than the bright side of semantic interoperability. In this abstract, we report on the condition of CMDI but also outlinean agenda to make the CMDI world a better place to use, share and profit from metadata.
In unserem Beitrag diskutieren wir Aspekte einer Forschungsdateninfrastruktur für den wissenschaftlichen Alltag auf Projektebene und argumentieren für eine Unterstützung von Projekten während der Erfassung und Bearbeitung von Daten, d. h. vor deren endgültiger Veröffentlichung. Dabei differenzieren wir zwischen Projekten, deren primäres Ziel es ist, eine Ressource aufzubauen (ressourcenschaffende Projekte, kurz RP) und solchen, die zur Beantwortung einer konkreten Forschungsfrage Daten sammeln und auswerten (Forschungsprojekte, kurz FP). Wir argumentieren dafür, dass bei den offenkundigen Unterschieden zwischen beiden Projektarten die grundsätzlichen Ansprüche an das alltägliche Forschungsdatenmanagement im Kern sehr ähnlich (wenn auch unterschiedlich akzentuiert und skaliert) sind. Diese Ähnlichkeit rührt nicht zuletzt daher, dass im Rahmen von FP gesammelte Daten in Bezug auf das Projektziel primär Mittel zum Zweck sein mögen, sie jedoch bereits im Arbeitsprozess in unterschiedlichem Maß von unterschiedlichen Beteiligten genutzt werden. Wir gehen konkret auf die Aspekte Datenorganisation und -verwaltung, Metadaten, Dokumentation und Dateiformate und deren Anforderungen in den verschiedenen Projekttypen ein. Schließlich diskutieren wir Lösungsansätze dafür, Aspekte des Forschungsdatenmanagements auch in (kleineren) Forschungsprojekten nicht post-hoc, sondern bereits in der Projektplanung als Teil der alltäglichen Arbeit zu berücksichtigen und entsprechende Unterstützung in der Forschungsinfrastruktur vorzusehen.
Signposts for CLARIN
(2021)
An implementation of CMDI-based signposts and its use is presented in this paper. Arnold, Fisseni et al. (2020) present signposts as a solution to challenges in long-term preservation of corpora. Though applicable to digital resources in general, we focus on corpora, especially those that are continuously extended or subject to modification, e.g., due to legal injunctions, but also may overlap with respect to constituents, and may be subject to migrations to new data formats. We describe the contribution signposts can make to the CLARIN infrastructure, notably virtual collections, and document the design for the CMDI profile.
CMDI Explorer
(2021)
We present CMDI Explorer, a tool that empowers users to easily explore the contents of complex CMDI records and to process selected parts of them with little effort. The tool allows users, for instance, to analyse virtual collections represented by CMDI records, and to send collection items to other CLARIN services such as the Switchboard for subsequent processing. CMDI Explorer hence adds functionality that many users felt was lacking from the CLARIN tool space.
Towards comprehensive definitions of data quality for audiovisual annotated language resources
(2021)
Though digital infrastructures such as CLARIN have been successfully established and now provide large collections of digital resources, the lack of widely accepted standards for data quality and documentation still makes re-use of research data a difficult endeavour, especially for more complex resource types. The article gives a detailed overview over relevant characteristics of audiovisual annotated language resources and reviews possible approaches to data quality in terms of their suitability for the current context. Conclusively, various strategies are suggested in order to arrive at comprehensive and adequate definitions of data quality for this specific resource type and possibly for digital language resources in general.
In this paper we present an approach to faceted search in large language resource repositories. This kind of search which enables users to browse through the repository by choosing their personal sequence of facets heavily relies on the availability of descriptive metadata for the objects in the repository. This approach therefore informs the collection of a minimal set of metatdata for language resources. The work described in this paper has been funded by the EC within the ESFRI infrastructure project CLARIN.
We present an XML-based metadata standard for the documentation of speech and multimedia corpora that was developed at the Institute for German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The IDS is one of the major institutions providing German speech and language corpora to researchers. These corpora stem from many different sources and were previously documented in a rather heterogeneous fashion using a variety of data models and formats. In order to unify the documentation for existing and future corpora, the IDS- internal Archive for Spoken German collaborated with several projects and developed a set of standardised XML metadata schemas. These XML schemas build on existing internal and external documentation schemas (such as IMDI) and take into account the workflow of speech corpus production. In order to minimise redundancy, separate schemas were designed for projects, speakers, recording sessions, and entire corpora. The resulting schemas are tested in ongoing speech and multi-media projects at the IDS and are regularly revised. They are accompanied by element definitions, guidelines, and examples. In addition, a mapping to IMDI will be provided.
The metadata management system for speech corpora “memasysco” has been developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and is applied for the first time to document the speech corpus “German Today”. memasysco is based on a data model for the documentation of speech corpora and contains two generic XML schemas that drive data capture, XML native database storage, dynamic publishing, and information retrieval. The development of memasysco’s information architecture was mainly based on the ISLE MetaData Initiative (IMDI) guidelines for publishing metadata of linguistic resources. However, since we also have to support the corpus management process in research projects at the IDS, we need a finer atomic granularity for some documentation components as well as more restrictive categories to ensure data integrity. The XML metadata of different speech corpus projects are centrally validated and natively stored in an Oracle XML database. The extension of the system to the management of annotations of audio and video signals (e.g. orthographic and phonetic transcriptions) is planned for the near future.
We present SPLICR, the Web-based Sustainability Platform for Linguistic Corpora and Resources. The system is aimed at people who work in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics: a comprehensive database of metadata records can be explored in order to find language resources that could be appropriate for one’s specific research needs. SPLICR also provides an interface that enables users to query and to visualise corpora. The project in which the system is being developed aims at sustainably archiving the ca. 60 language resources that have been constructed in three collaborative research centres. Our project has two primary goals: (a) To process and to archive sustainably the resources so that they are still available to the research community in five, ten, or even 20 years time. (b) To enable researchers to query the resources both on the level of their metadata as well as on the level of linguistic annota-tions. In more general terms, our goal is to enable solutions that leverage the interoperability, reusability, and sustainability of heterogeneous collections of language resources.
Corpus researchers, along with many other disciplines in science are being put under continual pressure to show accountability and reproducibility in their work. This is unsurprisingly difficult when the researcher is faced with a wide array of methods and tools through which to do their work; simply tracking the operations done can be problematic, especially when toolchains are often configured by the developers, but left largely as a black box to the user. Here we present a scheme for encoding this ‘meta data’ inside the corpus files themselves in a structured data format, along with a proof-of-concept tool to record the operations performed on a file.
This article describes a series of ongoing efforts at the Stanford Literary Lab to manage a large collection of literary corpora (~40 billion words). This work is marked by a tension between two competing requirements – the corpora need to be merged together into higher-order collections that can be analyzed as units; but, at the same time, it’s also necessary to preserve granular access to the original metadata and relational organization of each individual corpus. We describe a set of data management practices that try to accommodate both of these requirements – Apache Spark is used to index data as Parquet tables on an HPC cluster at Stanford. Crucially, the approach distinguishes between what we call “canonical” and “combined” corpora, a variation on the well-established notion of a “virtual corpus” (Kupietz et al., 2014; Jakubíek et al., 2014; van Uytvanck, 2010).
Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing.
In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.
The Meta-data-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources
(2008)
Our goal is to provide a web-based platform for the long-term preservation and distribution of a heterogeneous collection of linguistic resources. We discuss the corpus preprocessing and normalisation phase that results in sets of multi-rooted trees. At the same time we transform the original metadata records, just like the corpora annotated using different annotation approaches and exhibiting different levels of granularity, into the all-encompassing and highly flexible format eTEI for which we present editing and parsing tools. We also discuss the architecture of the sustainability platform. Its primary components are an XML database that contains corpus and metadata files and an SQL database that contains user accounts and access control lists. A staging area, whose structure, contents, and consistency can be checked using tools, is used to make sure that new resources about to be imported into the platform have the correct structure.