Short FAQ

Here are some short answers to common questions.

Q: Is the platform open source and free to use for any purpose?

A: Yes.

Q: How do I set up an endpoint for a corpus?

A: In a nutshell: You fork or copy the repository, clone it on a server, configure it, and run it as a web application. Then you configure a CLARIN aggregator, so that it knows where to find your endpoint.

Q: What kind of requests does an endpoint understand?

A: GET requests with several parameters. Two operations are available: explain provides basic info about a corpus, searchRetrieve returns search results from a corpus. A CQL-like language is used for queries. You will find more details in the specifications.

Q: What does an endpoint return?

A: It returns XML, which contains search results, corpus info and/or error messages. You will find more details in the specifications.

Q: How fast is this endpoint?

A: The endpoint itself only performs the translation, which is very fast. But it sends requests to corpora and must wait for a reply, which can take a long time.

Q: Can I use one endpoint for multiple corpora?

A: Yes. You create one configuration file per corpus. Each corpus gets an ID. Queries to different corpora must be sent to different URLs, which include these IDs.

Q: Does the endpoint understand all of the FCS query language?

A: It can parse any valid query. However, certain corpus platforms cannot process certain subsets of the query language. If a query is too complex for a corpus, you will get an appropriate diagnostic (i.e. error message) in XML.

Q: What about data protection?

A: The endpoint does not store any information on the server and does not place any cookies on the client’s machine.