FAIR-FI-LD - Moving towards a national FAIR-compliant ecosystem of Federated Infrastructure for Language Data

In the last 5-10 years, Swiss HEIs have been working on building national services for language data. They include, up to now, the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI-UZH), the Swiss-AL Platform for Applied Sciences (ZHAW), a national repository for the publication and long-term preservation of language data LaRS@SWISSUbase (UNIL, UZH), and various smaller tools and services. These units however are not all interoperable, which reduces the potential for collaboration and data reuse. In addition, fields such as interactional linguistics or second language acquisition lack adequate infrastructure.
With the foundation of the CLARIN-CH consortium in 2020 (9 HEls and the SAGW), the HEl's efforts took a new direction: work together to build a FAIR-compliant, sustainable and expandable CLARIN-CH ecosystem of federated infrastructure to answer the needs of researchers and professionals using language data in Switzerland and beyond; an ecosystem that must be interoperable at the national and European levels. The present project aims at realizing important steps towards this mid- and long-term goal, in compliance with the Swiss ORD strategy, by prototyping
- interoperable underlying software using NLP techniques and exploratory Al techniques
- harmonized metadata between the existing Swiss infrastructure components and the European CLARIN infrastructure
- CLARIN federated content search (FCS) to query each component of the infrastructure
- a FCS multilingual landing page hosted on the CLARIN-CH website
- a frontend of the VIAN-DH@LIRI environment to visualize, query and analyze multimodal talk-in-interaction data, hosted at USI, by producing
- documentation and training to support the use of the infrastructure and inform about legal and ethical issues related to language data in the context of Open Science, and by planning the future collaboration with further stakeholders and aggregation of further tools and services.