Resource and service centres as the backbone for a sustainable service infrastructure

Currently, research infrastructures are being designed and established in many disciplines, all partly to address the problem that they all suffer from an enormous fragmentation of their resources and tools. In the domain of language resources and tools the CLARIN initiative has been funded since 2008 to overcome many of the integration and interoperability hurdles. CLARIN can build on knowledge and work from many projects that have been carried out over many years, and will build stable and robust services for use by researchers. Service centres will play a key role, and must provide persistent and highly available services that adhere to criteria as they have been established by CLARIN. In the last year of the preparatory phase of CLARIN these centres are currently developing four use cases that can demonstrate how the various pillars CLARIN has been working on can be integrated. All four use cases fulfil the criteria of being cross-national.