CLARIN Centers for a Sustainable Infrastructure Daan Broeder, MPI for Psycholinguistics Jan Odijk, Utrecht University

Content  The Problem: Stable Services in a Dynamic World  CLARIN foundations: we have a center based solution  CLARIN Centers, how is that working out?  Adjustments required?  Recommendations

CLARIN centers From the start centers played an important role in the services infrastructure architecture planning “a backbone of CLARIN centers” is a phrase that is often found in the early documents. Fundamental: many centers are sharing responsibility Strategy:  Explicit responsibility for services  Explicit contact point Centers can gain exposure:  Explicit acknowledgement after assessment of:  Organizational aspects (DSA)  Technical competence (services)

Center variety  Originally CLARIN centers are mainly research institutes, and university departments  … many differences both in research focus and size  The first national projects were CLARIN-D and NL with ample means and many candidate centers  … some competition was not thought as evil  In some other disciplines a single or a few centers are dominant in research infrastructures  Which depending on their funding situation can make the infrastructure very vulnerable  However “single/few center infrastructure” is a valid approach

Center Taxonomy K R C E AAI service PID service Center Registry A VLO ISOCat VCregistry CMDIRegistry Assessment B DSA PIDs FIM CMDI L

Center infra evolution  Newer national CLARIN projects often have one single CLARIN center that is supported by several partners and serves the whole community  Consequence of smaller budget (compared with NL and D)  … or a smart way to save money?  One CLARIN center costs less and can represent many interests or organizations  However, is this stable?  ‘New’ trend: inclusion of broad data centers, libraries, …  Libraries participating in the core (No) … or still in the periphery (NL)

CLARIN Services sustainability  CLARIN services are not the core business for research institutes (and certainly not of general data centers)  Usually funded from the national project  … vulnerable for funding changes  Offering services and data should be seen as a important and funded from beyond CLARIN  … or better: services should be anchored in an institute’s own workflow  Nevertheless all may fail  So centers should accept take over services from others  Essential services can be doubled

How vulnerable are we?  Center downscaling  MPI has reconsidered its project strategy  A-services must be relocated  Loss of expert staff  Funding gaps  Research strategy changes

We need an Elastic Infrastructure What does that mean in a European context?  No dependence on a single national project  Certainly not dependent on one or a few centers  Coordinating parties are able to compensate for shrinking or disappearing centers  By:  Enable moving services to other centers (and test this)  Doubling of essential A-services  Enable easy outsourcing of services to compute (E-)centers  Fund software maintainers & developers and reserve adequate resources on national & EU level  Flag requirements to national & EU funders

Still need stable lynch-pins I  Assumption of long-term well funded stable research- institutes is perhaps not tenable  What is well-funded, stable and sustainable?  New developments as general data-centers, e-science organizations, EU data management infra projects etc.  Problems: too general approaches, motivation  Service specificity can be (partly) solved by  Careful integration of the specific with the general by modular policy based services. Will need some extra (shared) costs  Would mean CLARIN as a front-office for a general service provider

Still need stable lynch-pins II  libraries and national archives are attractive partners  These are obviously also getting their share of the national budgets  Nobody questions their sustainability  Problems: motivation, (old fashioned) practices, too general approaches.  Motivation will be solved e.g. libraries need to reposition themselves  Results vary per country countries, but in some libraries are already a core part of CLARIN national projects  Can expect the need for libraries to reposition will lead to useful modern data management practices  Service specificity could be (partly) solved by CLARIN (and others) collaborating and even partly integrating with them

Summing up to ‘Easy’ Recommendations  A CLARIN center should:  make providing (CLARIN compatible) services and data part of its mission  use those also for the center’s own research workflow  A-services must be built from the start with easy relocation in mind (and this should be tested)  Reserve adequate resources for outsourcing of services and funding of service development  Include broader multi-disciplinary institutes & service providers and see how to integrate with them  Starting with libraries and data centers & DM projects  Develop models in collaboration for building discipline specific services on top of general ones

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