Collaboration Agreement between PANACEA and META-NET

The Network of Excellence "Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society", henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project "Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition", henceforth PANACEA, 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

The objective of PANACEA is to build a factory of language resources (LRs) that progressively automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of LRs required by machine translation (MT) systems, among other Language Technology applications, and in the time required. PANACEA's highly automated production of high-quality LRs will revolutionize many fields of Language Technology. In particular, it will improve availability and quality of MT systems for all languages that have sufficient volumes and types of corpora available. The PANACEA platform will incorporate different technology components that will make possible a step-by-step automation of the whole process of producing LRs. Among the resources that will be produced within the project, there are monolingual and bilingual corpora (from multilingual web sites including data stored/hidden at different locations), which will be annotated and aligned (at various levels); extracted monolingual and multilingual lexica, and/or sets of transfer rules or grammars.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. META-NET aims at creating a sustainable network of distributed repositories of language data, tools and related web services documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inventories allowing for uniform search and access to resources. Data and tools can be both open and with restricted access rights, free and for-a-fee. This network of repositories, META-SHARE, targets existing but also new and emerging language data, tools and systems required for building and evaluating new technologies, products and services. In this respect, reuse, combination, repurposing and re-engineering of language data and tools, play a crucial role. META-SHARE will eventually be an important component of a language technology marketplace for HLT researchers and developers, language professionals (translators, interpreters, etc.), as well as industrial players, especially SMEs, catering for the full development cycle of HLT, from research through to innovative products and services.

Areas of collaboration

META-NET, through META-SHARE tries to build an ecosystem in the language resource production and distribution area. META-NET and PANACEA agree that, when PANACEA results will be made available to the language technology community in the terms expressed in the PANACEA Grant Agreement 248064, META-SHARE will be used as the channel to make these results public and accessible. To this end, PANACEA partners agree that

• PANACEA results (data sets, tools and web services) will be made visible and accessible through the META-SHARE central inventory.

• The PANACEA Registry will export metadata of all web services and resources used as data sets that are considered results of the project.

• PANACEA will provide META-SHARE with information about the metadata to be used for describing these results, to ensure that META-SHARE central servers can harvest directly PANACEA described services and data sets.
• PANACEA will provide information about PANACEA as user requirements to META-SHARE for discussion, adoption and implementation. In case that META-SHARE's forthcoming environment or metadata differ substantially from the ones provided by PANACEA as a project result, the PANACEA project will provide the META-SHARE development team assistance for the production of mappers, their testing and debugging.

The parties agree to prepare, by end 2010, an initial list of concrete areas and mutual objectives on which to collaborate, and plans for implementing this.