Swiss-AL and the FAIR Principles

10. Swiss-AL and the FAIR Principles#

In recent years, Switzerland underwent a shift in research culture, with Open Science becoming central to how projects were implemented and funded. As part of this shift, Switzerland adopted a National Open Research Data Strategy in 2021. Within this framework, the ZHAW Digital Discourse Lab committed to making Swiss-AL language resources and tools compliant with the FAIR principles—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

We undertook several steps to increase the FAIRness of the Swiss-AL Platform:

  1. We ensured that the Swiss-AL Pipeline is well documented and made available on the ZHAW GitLab repository swissal-pipeline as open-source under a GPL 3.0 licence.

  2. We registered the Swiss-AL Corpora metadata in SWISSUbase, a FAIR-compliant repository for the social sciences and linguistics. SWISSUbase ensures that uploaded data are FAIR by assigning persistent identifiers, maintaining machine-readable metadata, requiring users to choose a license, ensuring that metadata remain accessible even if the data are not, and ensuring long-term preservation. As SWISSUbase cooperates with CLARIN.eu, Swiss-AL Corpora will soon be searchable on large European repositories, such as CLARIN’s Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) and SSH Open Marketplace.

  3. We implemented access to Swiss-AL corpora through CLARIN-CH Content Search, an online service provided by CLARIN-CH that allows users to search language data stored across multiple Swiss institutions in a standardized way. The CLARIN-CH Content Search will soon be linked to the FCS Aggregator provided by CLARIN.eu, which offers an overview of more than 500 language resources in over 160 languages.

  4. We provide the possibility to download Swiss-AL data and visualisations in machine-readable formats.

  5. We create Open Educational Resources in which we collect examples of use and video material that help users working with language data. These resources will be registered in OER Switch, Switzerland’s OER repository for higher education, which allows users to search OER materials.

  6. While raw data are not directly available on the platform for data privacy and copyright reasons, we added links to original documents whenever retrieval was possible.