Language Resource Switchboard - SSHOC Service Catalogue's Factsheets Series
Creators: name: CLARIN ERIC
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: SSHOC
Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud
European Open Science Cloud
EOSC
Interoperability
switchboard tool Inventory
switchboard
Language Resources Switchboard
Language Resources

description: <strong>Matching tools and data</strong> Researchers in the Social Science and Humanities who work with digital data, often find themselves in a landscape with a large variety of resources, which makes it difficult to identify suitable data, tools or software that match their specific research requirements. The general need for guidance and recommendation is addressed by catalogues, such as the EOSC Marketplace or the SSH Open Marketplace. But successful searching in catalogues relies, to a large extent, on the ability of individual researchers to abstract away from their specific information needs and to understand the relevance of resources with a wider applicability. For researchers it would be more convenient to be able to start the search for suitable tools with what they easily have at hand: representative snippets or fragments of content. This functionality is offered by the <strong>Language Resource Switchboard</strong>. By making use of the formal information about the data input (format type, language, date of creation, etc.) the Switchboard makes it possible to automatically identify the tools that match the data. In order to limit the number of suggestions in a meaningful way, additional filtering can be made available to allow the user to take into account research-discipline specific features and the context of the disciplinary provenance or usage of a tool. <strong>How does the Switchboard work?</strong> The researcher uploads a representative snippet of data to the Switchboard user interface. The Switchboard “recognises” the presented data (usually a file with text, audio, video, etc.) and assembles a list of tools, software or web services that - given the data format, language, etc.- may be suited for processing the uploaded data. To support the selection from this tool list, the Switchboard categorises the results with a task-specific layer, indicating which type of process the tool can perform. For example: morphological analysis, sentiment analysis, or visualisation of geographic data. A user can either start from a file, specify a URL or copy/paste a text fragment. Once the data has been uploaded, an information pane appears with the information that has been detected for the input data and a list of the matching tools. The user can then click on any tool to get additional information and open the selected tool in a new browser tab. The Switchboard was originally developed by CLARIN as the Language Resource Switchboard as support for theselectionoftoolstoprocesslanguagedata.SSHOCisworkingonextendingtheSwitchboard service to ensure it is suitable for a wide range of users and data types by optimizing the filtering of services and the selection options. In addition the Switchboard will be integrated into key services and components from other service providers. The Switchboard is one of the thematic services registered at the EOSC portal and therefore visible also for disciplinary communities not participating in SSHOC. <strong>Benefits</strong> The Switchboard helps researchers to find and start tools that are suited for their research data. The Switchboard Tool Inventory provides a complete list of all tools that are taken into account by the Switchboard matching engine. As a special application, the Switchboard offers a few general dictionaries and look-up services that allow the user to translate or clarify selected text tokens. Repository or catalogue managers can configure the Switchboard to include new dictionary services. New tools for integration into the Switchboard may be suggested following the step-by- step documentation under the Switchboard Tool Registry. This is of particular interest for providers of tools and software who are interested in increasing the visibility and usage of their tools and services. The Switchboard Tool Inventory is growing and will include tools from an increasing number of research domains. Access here