Principles and Standards
Since 2019, CLARIAH-DE has been harmonizing complementary developments and results of the infrastructure projects CLARIN-D and DARIAH-DE into interoperable and reusable databases. This is made possible by the coordination of standards for the creation, preparation, and archiving of data and tools.
The research infrastructure CLARIAH-DE is committed to the FAIR principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. These principles place certain requirements on research data as well as the associated metadata in order to ensure the sustainability of data objects and to promote both the manual as well as the automated use of data.
These requirements cover a wide range of technical aspects, from ensuring interoperability through the use of extensively and comprehensibly documented data standards to the requirement of clear licensing of data objects.
The FAIR principles are an integral part of initiatives for research data management at scientific institutions - a modern handling of research data is FAIR.
Within CLARIAH-DE, the focus is on the fulfilment of the FAIR principles through language- and text-based research data. For this purpose, CLARIAH-DE offers tools facilitating the standard-compliant creation of and work with digital research data, such as the virtual research environment TextGrid, which focuses on working with TEI-XML documents.
CLARIAH-DE further provides repositories whose data objects are made available according to common standards. This includes metadata encoded according to established standards such as METS/MODS or Dublin Core. For the work with textual research data, CLARIAH-DE uses TEI-XML. When dealing with image objects and their metadata, CLARIAH-DE recommends the use of IIIF-technologies.
Another field of work in CLARIAH-DE is the development and use of standards for specific application scenarios. This includes, for example, the basic format of the German Text Archive (DTABf) and its derivatives as a subset of the TEI-standard for the integration of textual research data into interoperable text corpora.
In addition to its own work with and on the standards above and others, CLARIAH-DE actively participates in a number of committees and organizations concerned with the ongoing development of these standards. CLARIAH-DE also promotes the use of the standards by advising researchers on technical and organisational issues in dealing with them.
