Integrating Canonical Text Services into CLARIN's Search Infrastructure

Abstract

Today's digital research infrastructures target a variety of user groups. A key task to achieve acceptance and active participation among them are both user-friendly and machine-readable interfaces to digital resources. This is especially the case for highly integrated infrastructures like the CLARIN project. The Canonical Text Service Protocol CTS is an established system in document based Digital Humanities that covers many of associated problems, like dealing with varying levels of text granularity, persistent identification, address resolution and simple interfaces for an integration in various automatic work flows. The paper shows the advantages of integrating a CTS instance into CLARIN and also demonstrates additional benefits of this CTS implementation in form of built-in text mining techniques.

An Overview of Canonical Text Services

“…Language Independence is considered as a very important requirement for a Canonical Text Service, especially if it is supposed to work as an unifying infrastructure element as described in [22]. A text communication protocol that limits the possible text content for technical reasons -that may be unfamiliar for researchers in the Humanities -is obviously not helping much in a research field that includes multi lingual text corpora like the Parallel Bible Corpus ( [11]) with its 903 included languages.…”