Objective In order to serve the electronic multilingual resource market ELAN plans:- to reinforce or, where necessary, create international standards by designing a common query language (ELAN-CQL) and by providing standardised resources for the following languages : Albanian, Belgian French, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish and Uzbek.- to operate a user community network with active awareness-raising measures, a clear copyright policy, user support, e-mail user groups, etc.Companies, research teams and individuals involved in language engineering or in undertakings such as translating, dictionary making or philology require LARGE corpora, lexica and similar electronic resources. On the other hand such linguistic databases have already been created for most European languages. It can be observed that the need exists, the product exists and yet the two have until now rarely been brought together.This paradox can largely be explained by the fact that the language resources in question often cannot be accessed EASILY and usually cannot be exploited using STANDARDIZED procedures.Most existing European databases are not widely publicised, can only be accessed on site and are designed only for the immediate needs of the owner or producer. As a result, the software is often neither user-friendly nor portable, with documentation and support being non-existent or scant. In addition, the lack of a clear pricing means that each potential user must negotiate individually with the provider.Standardized procedures postulate that similar data is made available in a similar format and that a common query system can operate on it. Appreciable progress was made during the 90's regarding the standardisation of formats through projects such as the TEI. Concerning the second requirement nothing has been achieved so far.Two non-profit international associations - PAROLE and TELRI - have joined forces to undertake the ELAN project in order to link the existing resources with their potential users throughout Europe. Programme(s) IS-MLIS - Multiannual programme to promote the linguistic diversity of Europe in the Information Society, 1996-1998 Topic(s) Data not available Call for proposal Data not available Funding Scheme Data not available Coordinator PAROLE EU contribution No data Address 3 place Cockeill 4000 LIEGE Belgium See on map Total cost No data
