Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure

This document describes the goals and requirements of web services and workflow systems that could be used by all CLARIN members and beyond, i.e. a functioning system could be used by other communities as well. Stepwise all CLARIN centers would need to introduce these requirements in their operational environment to come to a proper landscape of resources, services and tools where various instances can and will be created/operated at various places. This document will be discussed in the appropriate working groups and in the Executive Board. It will be subject of regular adaptations dependent on the progress in CLARIN. Update Information This version is an update of the first version presented in 2009. To simplify the comparison with the earlier version we mainly introduced a new chapter 7 called " State and Evaluation ". In this chapter we will refer to other chapters when we are updating essential information. For small corrections that do not modify basic assumptions and statements we have changed the text. In this document we want to specify the requirements for the service oriented architecture which CLARIN is envisaging. This includes all aspects that have to with interoperability. While work package 5 will deal with these issues in detail from the linguistic point of view, work package 2 is focusing on the computer science aspects. Of course these two aspects are overlapping, therefore we expect that once work package 5 has come out with further requirements specifications and standards definitions a new version of this document will need to be written. The following topics are discussed in this document: • the relevant web service standards and the experiences of the involved partners o SOAP and REST must be supported and are described using WSDL or WADL o CLARIN MetaData Initiative (CMDI) framework will be used to describe web services • the workflow systems that have been suggested so far o CLARIN claims no preference to any work flow system • the work that has already been done within the community with respect to web services and workflow systems o A number of ready to use web services are presented in this document o GATE, UIMA, JBPM and Taverna are actively used in the community • the requirements that are relevant for the LRT community, in particular with respect to metadata, provenance information, authentication in distributed web services solutions, the import/export aspects which cover the structure/format and …