The ultimate goal of CLARIN was the construction and operation of a shared distributed infrastructure aiming at making language resources and technologies available to the humanities and social sciences research communities at-large.

The project Preparatory Phase paved the way to the implementation of the infrastructure along four dimensions.

• Funding and Governance
  The aim is to bring together funding agencies and to work out a ready-to-sign draft agreement among funding agencies in the participating countries about governance, financing, construction and operation of the infrastructure.
• Technical
  The technical objective is to provide a detailed specification of the infrastructure, an agreement on data and interoperability standards to be adopted and a running, validated prototype based on these specifications. The validation should cover technical, linguistic and user-related aspects.
• Language
  For the validation the prototype will be populated with a selection of language resources and technologies for all participating languages. The objective is to deliver a sufficiently populated and thoroughly tested prototype that demonstrates the adequacy of the approach for all participating languages.
• User
  In order to fully exploit the potential of what language resources and technologies have to offer to the humanities and social sciences communities, the project consortium will: (i) make an analysis of current practice in the use of language technologies in the humanities in order to establish the needs; (ii) launch and monitor typical humanities projects in order to validate the prototype and its specifications; (iii) create the awareness - in the humanities and social sciences communities - of the potential of the use of language resources and technologies to improve or innovate their research; (iv) bring together the humanities and language technologies communities in order to ensure lasting synergies.