[Sigwac] Call for discussion: The SIGWAC crisis (instead, of an announcement of WAC-XI)

[Miloš Jakubíček]

Hi,

On 1 August 2017 at 12:21, Roland Schäfer <roland.schaefer at fu-berlin.de>
wrote:

> Dear Adrien,
>
> thanks a lot for joining the discussion.
>
> On 01.08.17 11:54, Adrien Barbaresi wrote:
> >
> > If I understand correctly, the CLARIN or YaCy initiatives share a common
> > ground, that is resource pooling. We could confer on how to make part of
> > our corpora available under a "meta" multilingual search engine. A
> > research consortium such as CLARIN can help at the institutional level,
> > and distributed search engines like YaCy are a practical solution for
> > low-resource cooperation.
>
> That is surely true, and it is a valid option. My two main objections are:
>
> 1. This is not a research question, but a question of generating more
> users or giving users a consistent interface for many resources (= CLARIN).
>
> 2. I think it will be difficult to achieve this, given that the major
> European web corpus projects are – besides the one you are involved in –
> SketchEngine and COW, and Aranea. I don't know about Aranea, but since
> SketchEngine is a fully self-contained high-quality paid service, would
> they agree to join such an effort? And given the unsolved intellectual
> property situation in the EU, esp. Germany, COW simply cannot do that
> (except for COCO, if some CLARIN repo takes the full risk of recovering
> the corpora from CommonCrawl and the COCCOA stand-off files, which I
> doubt they will).
>

Not sure whether this is what Adrien meant. Let's not mix research &
business & legal issues -- those three are quite separate topics.
As for research we are all in as always. CLARIN is already at the moment
building a Federated Content Search and by the way (No)Sketch Engine is one
of the very few available end-points to that - so that people can plug in
their NoSketch Engine instances, or use the main one if they have account
(trial or paid).


>
> I admit, though, that none of the contributors to this discussion has
> expressed much enthusiasm towards my suggestions to tackle more
> fundamental conceptual issues
>
>
wait, wait - I did ;) I said in my earlier e-mails, let's setup an agenda
first.
But - I'm not sure whether the word meaning of "conceptual" in your private
ontology a my private ontology overlap ;), so, what in your opinion, would
be these most fundamental conceptual issues?

All the best
Milos