PICCL: Philosophical Integrator of Computational and Corpus Libraries

Abstract

CLARIN activities in the Netherlands in 2015 are in transition between the first national project CLARIN-NL and its successor CLARIAH. In this paper we give an overview of important infrastructure developments which have taken place throughout the first and which are taken to a further level in the second. We show how relatively small accomplishments in particular projects enable larger steps in further ones and how the synergy of these projects helps the national infrastructure to outgrow mere demonstrators and to move towards mature production systems. The paper centers around a new corpus building tool called PICCL. This integrated pipeline offers a comprehensive range of conversion facilities for legacy electronic text formats, Optical Character Recognition for text images, automatic text correction and normalization, linguistic annotation, and preparation for corpus exploration and exploitation environments. We give a concise overview of PICCL’s components, integrated now or to be incorporated in the foreseeable future.