Collaboration Agreement between MultilingualWeb-LT and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the MultilingualWeb-LT (LT-Web) project, henceforth MLW-LT, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

MLW-LT will enhance the foundation for the integration of language related technologies into core Web technologies. This will be achieved via the creation of a W3C Recommendation defining metadata applicable by language related technologies in the Web. Beginning with the network of stakeholders built via the MultilingualWeb and META-NET projects, the Working Group will create broad consensus across communities, involving producers of content, localization workers, language technology experts, browser vendors, tool makers and users. MLW-LT will lay the technical foundations for new business opportunities for content creators and the vendors who provide them with language and content services and tools. This will enable content creators and distributors to reach out to a growing linguistic and cultural diversity of Web users worldwide, and to respond to their specific needs in a timely and cost-effective manner.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are: to build a strategic alliance META, consisting of national and international research programmes, corporate users and commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

MLW-LT has gathered stakeholders in various industries: language technology, localization, Web community at large. META-NET was instrumental in creating MLW-LT, by being a platform for these stakeholders to meet.

In the future MLW-LT and META-NET will continue this broad community building via the following means:

• MLW-LT will actively participate and exhibit at META events, e.g. META-FORUM;

• MLW-LT will promote META through its various dissemination channels and materials;

• MLW-LT will provide access to its tools and data resources via the META-SHARE infrastructure, in addition to MLW-LT project specific dissemination channels.