A policy case for Greek as a national and European language data infrastructure
Large language models depend on vast amounts of text, but scale without legal clarity produces fragile systems. Datasets built on opaque web crawling cannot guarantee lawful reuse, redistribution, or long-term sustainability. The German Commons provides a clear alternative: 154.56 billion tokens of verifiably open text, sourced from institutional providers, processed with transparent pipelines, and released as a reusable public resource.
Its importance lies not only in volume, but in governance. Licensing is explicit at document level, provenance is preserved, and all processing code is open. This transforms training data into infrastructure rather than a disposable research artifact.
Greek poses an even stronger challenge. It is a language with exceptional temporal depth, spanning Ancient Greek, Koine, Byzantine and early modern forms, katharevousa, contemporary Greek, and numerous regional varieties. Models trained on narrow contemporary corpora fail to generalize across history, law, administration, and cultural heritage. Comprehensive coverage is therefore essential.
Today, Greek language resources exist but are fragmented across research infrastructures, public sector datasets, cultural institutions, and open knowledge projects. The absence of a unified framework for licensing, metadata, and reuse prevents these assets from supporting large-scale open model development.
This is where GlossAPI provides a foundation. GlossAPI is an open infrastructure for Greek AI-ready data, offering open-source tools and processes to collect, normalize, document, and publish Greek text with clear licensing and provenance. Its mission directly addresses the core bottleneck for Greek NLP: the scarcity of large, trustworthy, open datasets.
Policy proposal: Greek Commons as public infrastructure
Greek Commons should be established as a national public data infrastructure, with a mandate to:
- aggregate Greek language data from public administration, research, culture, and education,
- enforce explicit open licenses and provenance metadata at document level,
- operate fully with open-source, reproducible pipelines,
- support research, education, and production use without legal ambiguity.
At the European level, Greek Commons should function as a node in a federated European language commons, aligned with EU Digital Commons and interoperability initiatives. This would ensure that Greek participates on equal footing with larger languages, strengthening linguistic diversity, digital sovereignty, and open innovation across Europe.
By following the German Commons model and building on the goals and tooling of GlossAPI, Greek Commons can become durable public infrastructure, safeguarding the Greek language as a living digital resource for the AI era.