Abstract
This chapter looks at a fragment of the ongoing work of the CLARIN Standards Committee (CSC) on producing a shared set of recommendations on standards, formats, and related best practices supported by the CLARIN infrastructure and its participating centres. What might at first glance seem to be a straightforward goal has over the years proven to be rather complex, reflecting the robustness and heterogeneity of the emerging distributed digital research infrastructure and the various disciplines and research traditions of the language-based humanities that it serves and represents, and therefore part of the chapter reviews the various initiatives and proposals that strove to produce helpful standards-related guidance.
The focus turns next to a subtask initiated in late 2019, its scope narrowed to one of the core activities and responsibilities of CLARIN backbone centres, namely the provision of data deposition services. Centres are obligated to publish their recommendations concerning the repertoire of data formats that are best suited for their research profiles.
We look at how this requirement has been met by the particular centres and suggest that having centres maintain their information in the Standards Information System (SIS) is the way to improve on the current state of affairs.