SMC Browser

SMC Browser is a web application developed in the context of CLARIN. It allows to explore the data space of the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI), a framework for harmonized creation and publication of language resources descriptions (metadata).

It visualizes the growing number of profiles, components, and elements defined within CMDI, their semantic grounding in the concepts, and their interrelations as an interactive graph. In particular, it enables the metadata modeller to examine the reuse of components or data categories in different profiles. The graph is accompanied by statistical information about individual nodes, e.g. counting how many elements a profile contains, or in how many profiles given data category is used.

As such, it targets the data modellers of projects, concerned with the task of developing new or reusing existing metadata schemas. It enables them to gain a better overview of the existing CMD components and their usage, thus helping to foster reuse and to prevent the component proliferation.

Semantic interoperability has been one of the main concerns addressed by the CMDI and appropriate provisions were weaved into the underlying meta-model as well as all the modules of the infrastructure. This interoperability mechanism is grounded in well-defined atomic concepts, which the metadata modeller can link to indicate semantics for any given element in a schema. This mechanism is exploited in the discovery components of the infrastructure, primarily the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) to enhance the search capabilities (improve recall) over the heterogeneous collection of resource descriptions - the joint CLARIN metadata domain.