WebLicht: Web-based LRT services in a distributed escience infrastructure

Abstract

eScience - enhanced science - is a new paradigm of scientific work and research. In the humanities, eScience environments can be helpful in establishing new workflows and lifecycles of scientific data. WebLicht is such an eScience environment for linguistic analysis, making linguistic tools and resources available network-wide. Today, most digital language resources and tools (LRT) are available by download only. This is inconvenient for someone who wants to use and combine several tools because these tools are usually incompatible with each other. To overcome this restriction, WebLicht makes the functionality of linguistic tools and the resources themselves available via the internet as web services. In WebLicht, several kinds of linguistic tools are available which cover the basic functionality of automatic and incremental creation of annotated text corpora. To make use of the more than 70 tools and resources currently available, the end user needs nothing more than just a common web browser.