EAGLES objectives

The overall strategic aims of the EAGLES initiative were as follows:

• to produce publicly defined and commonly agreed specifications and guidelines for specific areas of language engineering,
• to bring together industry and academia in an attempt to reconcile the often heterogeneous interests and approaches pursued by the two groups,
• to create focal points of expertise in Europe,
• to complement related European R&D projects falling under the LRE, ESPRIT  and EUREKA programmes,
• to enhance the usability, portability  and comparability of EU projects' results and thus maximise return on investment in the development of language products and services,
• to contribute to consensus building on an international scale by interacting with national and international standardisation initiatives, and
• to safeguard the multilingual dimension of Europe.

In addition, more specific objectives were defined as follows:

• to promote and accelerate cooperation and consensus building in specific areas of language engineering in Europe,
• to produce prenormative specifications and guidelines for the description and representation of linguistic knowledge and data, including methods for the assessment and evaluation of systems and components which make use of such information,
• to play an active role in the definition, demonstration, evaluation, validation, promotion and dissemination of said specifications, thus furthering harmonisation of the methods and formats used for the encoding and interchange of linguistic knowledge and data,
• to exploit and complement the results achieved in EAGLES members' own R&D activities,
• to actively seek cohesion with cooperative R&D efforts in Europe and worldwide,
• to produce a set of guidelines based on a broad consensus among participating organisations, which will be made publicly available and to which European and national R&D activities will be invited to adhere, and
• to provide input to national and European standardisation bodies active in relevant fields.