Federated Content Search (FCS)

Federated Content Search (FCS) is a search service that allows users to simultaneously search text and language resources from various data repositories. FCS is based on a common technical standard developed by Text+ and the European CLARIN Consortium. This enables users to search content from different institutions and countries via a web interface.

The FCS supports various search modes tailored to different research needs. The full-text search allows users to find words or phrases in the available resources and view the results in their respective contexts. It is particularly suitable for quickly exploring the dataspace or for searching for specific terms and phrases across all resource types.

For more detailed inquiries into annotated text corpora and editions, the Advanced Search provides access to various levels of annotation, provided they are available in the respective resources. This allows users to formulate queries based on word forms, base forms, parts of speech, and even references to authority data, and to address complex linguistic questions across multiple datasets.

In addition to searching text corpora and editions, the FCS also supports research in dictionaries and word networks through the Lexical Search. Search queries can draw on these resources’ structures—such as word definitions, various grammatical information, and semantic word relationships—to access extensive information from lexical resources.

By combining the various search modes, the FCS links the search for examples in texts with research in lexical knowledge bases, thereby offering unified access to different types of language-related resources.