CLARIN Concept Registry: The New Semantic Registry

The CLARIN Concept Registry (clarin.eu/conceptregistry) is the place in the CLARIN Infrastructure where common and shared semantics of, but not limited to, linguistic concepts are defined. This is important to achieve semantic interoperability, and to overcome to a degree the diversity in data structures, either in metadata or linguistic resources, encountered within the infrastructure. Whereas in the past, CLARIN has been using the ISOcat registry for these purposes, nowadays this new registry is being used, as ISOcat turned out to have some serious drawbacks as far as its use in the CLARIN community is concerned. The main difference between the two semantic registries is that the CCR is a concept registry whereas ISOcat is a data category registry. In this paper we describe why the decision to switch to a concept registry has been made. We also describe the most important other characteristics of the new (Open)SKOSbased registry, as well as the management procedures used to prevent a recurrent proliferation of entries, as was the case with ISOcat.