CLARIN-D is the German section of CLARIN, the European long-term project to create a technological infrastructure for research in the humanities and social sciences.

This infrastructure will provide the various disciplines with simple and consistent access to primary and secondary data prepared on linguistic criteria and to many tools for linguistic annotation and analysis. Nine service centres, including one at the BBAW, are reponsible for operating the CLARIN -D infrastructure. This involves distributed storage and archiving of data in digital repositories, the supervision and maintenance of the services offered, provision of detailed metadata and the administration of access to the components. CLARIN -D will provide rich interfaces to its infrastructure and will ensure the provision of unique and persistent references to all research data and tools. This will make it easy in future to record CLARIN-D components in other catalogue systems too. The repositories can also be used to store text, audio and multimodal research data produced by institutes and researchers outside the CLARIN-D consortium.

The BBAW will make available data and services that have been developed in the Research Centre Language as primary and secondary data, including the extensive text and dictionary data of the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv) and the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache).

After completing the preparatory phase (2008–2010), CLARIN-D, together with its European sister-projects, is now in the implementation phase (2011–2015). CLARIN-D is supported by the BMBF and some of the German federal states.