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LiRI – Linguistic Research Infrastructure

FAIR-FI-LD

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Description

Moving towards a national FAIR-compliant ecosystem of Federated Infrastructure for Language Data, short FAIR-FI-LD, is a swissuniversities ORD-funded 12 months project (July 2024-June 2025) hosted by the University of Zurich, with the participation of CLARIN-CH, LiRI, ZHAW and USI. 

In the last 5-10 years, Swiss higher education institutions (HEI) have been working on building national services for language data. They include, up to now, the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (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 HEIs and the SAGW), the HEI'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.

Principal Investigators

  • Dr. Cristina Grisot (CLARIN-CH)
  • Prof. Dr. Noah Bubenhofer (LiRI)
  • Prof. Dr. Julia Krasselt (ZHAW)
  • Prof. Dr. Johanna Miecznikowski-Fuenfschilling (USI)
  • Project coordinator: Dr. Letizia Volpin, Dr. Joanna Blochowiak

Main outcomes

The FAIR-FI-LD project has made important progress in advancing a federated, FAIR-compliant infrastructure for language data in Switzerland. Through close collaboration among key national partners—including CLARIN-CH, LiRI, ZHAW, and USI—the project delivered both technical and organizational outcomes that strengthened the foundation for sustainable language data services.

Adaptation of CLARIN technologies to Swiss platforms

  • Implementation of Federated Content Search (FCS)
  • Creation of a multilingual FCS landing page
  • API deployment by LiRI and Swiss-AL for platform interoperability

Community Engagement & Collaborationmai

  • Regular alignment meetings across the project
  • Collaborative planning for future developments
  • Final stakeholder workshop (June 23, 2025, USI)

Data Management & Metadata

  • Working solution for metadata-only registration in SWISSUbase
  • Increased discoverability of Swiss language resources
  • Focus on interactional and multimodal language data

Capacity building & User support

  • Creation of comprehensive documentation
  • Distribution of training materials across institutions
  • Enabling researchers to navigate tools and standards

Additional Information

Call for participation

Are you a member of the Swiss scientific community working with language resources and you feel concerned about the topics addressed in this project?

Would you like to get involved?

Please drop an email to Cristina Grisot.

CLARIN-CH logo with the text "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure"

Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure

More about Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure

CLARIN – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – is a pan-European research infrastructure aiming to render accessible all digital language resources and tools from all over Europe through a single sign-on online environment. Several Swiss academic institutions have manifested their intention to join CLARIN, first as an Observer member and later as Full member. For this, they have founded the consortium CLARIN-CH in 2020.