Help with embedding a VLO search box on an external website

[martin.wynne@bodleian.ox.ac.uk]

I would like to embed a search box for the VLO on an external (i.e. not CLARIN.eu) website. Is there a recommended way to do this, or any help available to implement it?

This is perhaps a feature that would be useful to a number of CLARIN national consortia - they could include a VLO search box on their sites.

[Twan Goosen]

Hi Martin, good question/suggestion. There are several ways in which this could be done, though not all of these are currently supported by the VLO. Which approach is most suitable depends on the functionality you would like to offer.

The easiest would be to define a form that submits a request through the browser to https://vlo.clarin.eu/search with a GET parameter q that contains the search query (as described ​here). This would redirect the user the VLO, away from the page that has the search box (optionally in a new window/tab).

A more 'integrated' approach in terms of the user's experience would be using frames, but this has technical complications and I would consider it a brittle solution in terms of browser support. In the future we would like to offer an API that should enable more solid and 'seamless' integrations (likely requiring a bit more implementation work) but I don't expect this become available by the end of the year at the earliest.

I think that technically we could very well turn this into an FAQ item on the CLARIN website. But before we do that I would need to know if there are any policy or strategic aspects to this - which kinds of integrations do we actually want to to see used as CLARIN in which contexts? Adding Dieter in case he has any comments on this.