annex i - “description of work”...part a of annex i – project summary and budget breakdown...

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

COMPETITIVENESS AND INNOVATION FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME

ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP)

Theme 5 - Multilingual web

ICT PSP call identifier: CIP-ICT-PSP-2009-3 ICT PSP Theme/objective identifier: 5.2: Multilingu al Web content management: standards and best practices Grant agreement for: THEMATIC NETWORK

Annex I - “Description of Work” Project acronym: MultilingualWeb Project full title: Advancing the Multilingual Web, Thematic Network Grant agreement no.: 250500 Date of preparation of Annex I (Version 2): 26 October 2009 Date of approval of Annex I by Commission: (to be completed by Commission) Date of start of the project: 1st January 2010 Name of the Network coordinator: Richard Ishida W3C – The World Wide Web Consortium e-mail: [email protected] Tél:+ 1 6173951127 Name of the administrative and financial coordinator: Céline Bitoune GEIE ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) e-mail: [email protected] Tél: +33 4 92385077

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Table of Contents PART A of Annex I – Project Summary and budget breakdown ..............................................4

A1. Project summary form (copy of A1 form of the GPFs) .................................................. 4 A2. List of beneficiaries ......................................................................................................... 5 Shortname corrected to match with those entered into NEF.................................................. 5 A3. Budget breakdown form (copy of A3.1 form of the GPFs) ............................................ 6

PART B of Annex I.................................................................................................................... 8 Project Profile......................................................................................................................... 8 B1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES ......................................................... 10

B1.1. Project objectives.................................................................................................... 10 Project background............................................................................................................... 10 Project objectives ................................................................................................................. 10

B1.2. EU and national dimension..................................................................................... 11 B2. IMPACT ........................................................................................................................ 14

B2.1. Expected impact and outcomes .............................................................................. 14 B2.2. Long term viability ................................................................................................. 16 B2.3. Availability of common results, consensus building, openness, sustainability...... 17

B3. IMPLEMENTATION ................................................................................................... 19 B 3.1. Consortium and key personnel .............................................................................. 19 1: ERCIM/W3C................................................................................................................ 21 2: Bioloom Group............................................................................................................. 21 3: CNR-ILC (I)................................................................................................................. 22 4: Facebook Ireland, ......................................................................................................... 22 5: The University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Potsdam.................................................. 23 6: Institut Josef Stefan (JSI) ............................................................................................. 23 7: Institutul de Cercetari pentru Intelegentia Articificiala (ICIA).................................... 24 8: The Language Technology Centre ............................................................................... 24 9: Lionbridge Belgium ..................................................................................................... 24 10: Microsoft Ireland........................................................................................................ 25 11: Opera Software........................................................................................................... 26 12: SAP AG...................................................................................................................... 26 13: The Translation Automation User Society (TAUS)................................................... 26 14: AALTO-KORKEAKOULUSAATIO........................................................................ 26 15: University of Oviedo (ILTO) ..................................................................................... 27 16: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM................................................................. 27 17: The Language Resource Centre ................................................................................. 28 18: University of Economics, Prague............................................................................... 28 19: Transware Ltd (WeLocalize) ..................................................................................... 28 20: XML-INTL ................................................................................................................ 29 The European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation .................................. 30 The Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) ............................................... 30 B3.2a. Chosen approach................................................................................................... 31 i) Workshops................................................................................................................ 31 ii) Associated ‘practical work items’ ............................................................................ 31 iii) Risk analysis and contingency plan ..................................................................... 34 B3.2b. Work plan ............................................................................................................. 36 i) GANTT CHART...................................................................................................... 36 ii) Performance Monitoring Table to show success indicators..................................... 37

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Notes: ............................................................................................................................... 37 iii) Workplan Tables tabular descriptions (registered online using NEF) ................. 38 WT 1: Work package list: ................................................................................................ 38 WT2: Deliverables list ..................................................................................................... 39 WT3: Work package descriptions WP01...................................................................... 41 WT3: Work package descriptions WP02...................................................................... 44 WT3: Work package descriptions WP03...................................................................... 47 WT3: Work package descriptions WP04...................................................................... 50 WT3: Work package descriptions WP05...................................................................... 53 WT4 –List of Milestones n/a......................................................................................... 56 WT5: List of Tentative Reviews ...................................................................................... 56 WT6: Summary effort table ............................................................................................. 57 B3.3. Project management ............................................................................................... 58 B3.4. Dissemination / Use of results ................................................................................ 60 B3.5. Resources to be committed..................................................................................... 61

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

PART A of Annex I – Project Summary and budget breakdown Part A of Annex I is comprised of the following sections, which are generated automatically by the NEF online tool from the information provided in the GPFs:

A1. Project summary form (copy of A1 form of the GPFs)

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

A2. List of beneficiaries

Shortname corrected to match with those entered into NEF

List of participants: Participant no. Participant organisation name Participant short

name Country

1 (Co-ordinator) GEIE ERCIM ERCIM/W3C France 2 (Participant) Bioloom Group Bioloom Germany 3 (Participant) Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche CNR Italy 4 (Participant) Facebook Ireland Facebook Ireland 5 (Participant) Fachhochschule Potsdam UAS Potsdam Germany 6 (Participant) Institut Jozef Stefan IJS Slovenia 7 (Participant) Institutul de Cercetari Pentru Inteligentia

Artificiala ICIA Romania

8 (Participant) Language Technology Centre Ltd. LTC UK 9 (Participant) Lionbridge Belgium Lionbridge Belgium 10 (Participant) Microsoft Ireland Research Microsoft Ireland 11 (Participant) Opera Software ASA Opera Norway 12 (Participant) SAP AG SAP Germany 13 (Participant) J.D. van der Meer Beleggingen B.V. TAUS Netherlands 14 (Participant) AALTO-KORKEAKOULUSAATIO AALTO Finland 15 (Participant) Universidad de Oviedo UO Spain 16 (Participant) Universidad Politécnica de Madrid UPM Spain 17 (Participant) University of Limerick University of f

Limerick Ireland

18 (Participant) Vysoka Skola Ekonomicka V Praze VEVP Czech Republic

19 (Participant) Transware Limited Welocalize Ireland 20 (Participant) XML-INTL Ltd. XML-INTL UK Unfunded Participant

European Commission Directorate-General for Translation

DGT Luxembourg

Unfunded Participant

The Localization Industry Standards Association

LISA Switzerland

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

A3. Budget breakdown form (copy of A3.1 form of the GPFs)

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

CIP-ICT PSP-2009-3 Thematic Network - MultilingualWeb

Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

PART B of Annex I

Project Profile Information on the Thematic Network Objectives

Set a foundation for improving support on the Web for languages of the European Union and its trade partners, improving the efficiency of processes for creating and localizing content, both by machine translation and more traditional methods, and improving support for multilingual content and data on the Web. Establish a network between stakeholders for the improvement of the multilingual Web, in order to promote the adoption of current standards and best practices, explore the needs for future standards work and best practices, and create a basis for long-term synergies between the participants, who are coming from a variety of disciplines. Improve content development in (X)HTML and CSS by helping content authors better understand the standards and best practices they should be following. Help user agent developers to identify and correctly enable support for multilingual standards and best practices.

Activities and Outcomes 4 workshops, hosted by partners, open to public participation, with the following goals: • Sharing of experiences and knowledge about existing standards and best practices. • Discussion and recommendations about gaps that need to be addressed. • The workshops allow for detailed discussion around general topic areas related to the

standards and best practices landscape, Web authoring, translation tool support, and another area to be decided during the project by the partners.

• Community building, with the goal of establishing a long-term platform for working on topics concerning the multilingual web

Minutes and recommendations to be published on the project Web site for public consumption.

Supported by archived, moderated mailing lists to allow public discussions to complement the workshops, a wiki and a number of dissemination methods, including a twitter stream, blog aggregation, conference presentations, etc. The high visibility of the W3C site and its prestige for standards and best practices will also make a significant contribution to the visibility of the results.

Practical work items, developed by the W3C with input from partners, and made available to the general public from the W3C site: • A publicly available tool for checking markup of web sites with regard to requirements of

the multilingual Web (like the W3C HTML validator) should help educate and inform content developers about best practices and standards in an easy to use, and therefore effective manner, and should improve the quality of language support in Web pages.

• A publicly available set of educational materials, developed by the W3C, that should also help HTML and CSS content developers create language-friendly Web content.

• A set of test results, provided by partners, for tests on the W3C site should help developers


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

of Web pages better understand what techniques are widely supported, and should also inform the development of the previously mentioned training materials, but will also help user agent developers to find and rectify gaps in support for multilingual features in their products.

• Face to face meetings of partners to provide input to and review of practical work items. Consortium

The consortium includes a range of participants from 15 countries which have not cooperated yet in a joint effort of this scale, from the areas that include standardisation, content development and deployment, localisation, translation tools and machine translation, language technology development, training, usability, social networking, browser development, digital libraries, etc. Partners come from industry, standards bodies, user and industry representative bodies, research and academia. Since the Web is in the centre of the project, the W3C, as the main organisation for Web technology standardisation, is a natural leader for this effort. The W3C will provide its expertise in organizing working groups and workshops as coordinator for the Thematic Network. It will also provide logistic support in terms of mailing lists, conference management systems, etc, and offers the use of its high ranking and highly visible web site for dissemination of results, project home page etc. The participants will be expected to pool their knowledge of standards and best practices and help arrive at recommendations for future work via the workshops and face-to-face meetings. They will also provide program committee support for planning workshop agendas and choosing public participants. In addition, all workshops and face-to-face meetings will be hosted by one of the partners. Additionally partners will be called upon to help disseminate the information being generated. They will also contribute advice for and review the practical work items involving development work, and contribute test results for an internationalization test suite.

Impact

• Contribution to the understanding and the relations between standards in the area of the

multilingual web, and improved visibility and use of existing standards and best practices. • A starting point for future, potentially long-term projects in the area of multilingual web

standardisation, best practices and tools development. • As a means to create such projects, creating a strong relation between the participants across

organisations, scientific disciplines and industrial application areas. • Improved use of multilingual standards and best practices in the creation of pages using

(X)HTML and CSS by content developers. • Improved support for multilingual features in Web user agents.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

B1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

B1.1. Project objectives

Project background Given the importance of the World Wide Web to communication in all walks of life and as the share of English Web pages decreases and share of non-English languages used in the European Union, and around the world, increases on the Web, the importance of ensuring the multilingual viability of the World Wide Web is paramount. The European community must address this with respect to the needs of the citizens within its borders, but also with respect to its trade and relations with external communities around the world. One of the overall objectives of the ICT PSP is to accelerate the development of an ‘inclusive information society’, allowing access to the Web for all kinds of citizens. One of the hurdles it cites is the lack of interoperability of solutions across the Member States. The overview of Theme 5: Multilingual Web, states that overcoming language barriers by enabling cross-lingual access to Web resources suffers from a lack of language-friendly Web conventions. Standards and best practices are a means of increasing interoperability and encouraging coherence across advances in ICT. They also provide targets that push applications intended for creation, display and management of content to consider the requirements for supporting multilingual use of the Web. Responding to the concerns expressed above will involve bringing people together from the multiple disciplines that feed into the multilingual Web to understand what best practices and standards exist currently, and to look forward to what advances will further reduce the barriers to an inclusive information society. Although important standardisation work on establishing a base for multilingual deployment of the Web has been and is being addressed by organizations such as the W3C and the IETF, for example use of Unicode in Web technologies, roll-out of Internationalized Domain Names, development of standardised language tags, etc., people producing multilingual content for the Web feel that there remain a number of barriers to full multilingual roll-out of information and tools, and these need to be addressed. These barriers, in a range of areas, reduce efficiency or prevent the work of those attempting to provide a truly multilingual Web experience. They affect the ability to produce, localize, manage and share information and applications on the Web. Standards and best practices enable interoperability of data, which in turn maximises the potential for access to information, ensures longevity and usability of data, and improves the efficiency of processes for producing, localizing and disseminating information.

Project objectives These objectives address the stated aim of Objective 5.2: Multilingual Web content management: standards and best practices:


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

“to promote Web standards, best practices and partnerships for multilingual Web content management, in particular the authoring, versioning and maintenance of (parallel) multilingual Web sites, portals or repositories.”

The purpose of this Thematic Network proposal is to establish both a cross-disciplinary network and a forum for stakeholders drawn from different areas involved in the realisation of the multilingual Web, in particular the authoring, versioning and maintenance of multilingual Web sites, portals or repositories. The main objectives are:

1. To improve the transparency and usability of the World Wide Web across the European Union and the rest of the world by encouraging and facilitating adoption of multilingual Web standards and best practices.

2. By holding a number of workshops, to provide an opportunity for learning about and

discussion of what standards and best practices are currently available and what is currently missing, and to do so by bringing together people from a range of fields involved in realising the multilingual Web, including production of content, usability of hypertext, localization, language tools, Web deployment and research. Partners will bring together the concerns of publishers using large content management systems, people working on archives, providers of tools for social networking, government and official bodies, and also researchers and developers working on translation and language technologies, markup specialists, browser developers, usability experts, and industry bodies, and more, and the workshops will also be opened for public participation.

3. To use consensus to formulate recommendations for work on standards and best practices that

can then be taken up by relevant organizations. Relevant organizations may include workshop attendees or other organizations throughout the industry, including future projects organized by the European Commission.

4. To raise the visibility among the public of available standards and best practices, and encourage their use, and promote involvement in development of new standards.

5. To stimulate the exploration of and solutions to issues outside the framework of the project, and to promote cross-functional collaborations in addressing the problems.

6. To establish new relationships and partnerships between people and organizations, to form a cross-domain network of contacts interested in furthering the work of producing standards and best practices for the multilingual Web.

7. To support the development of specific tools for improving the multilingual Web that will be developed at the W3C. These include a validator (similar to the W3C’s widely used HTML validator) that content authors can use to check pages for internationalization issues in markup and style sheets, training materials on internationalization topics related to Web page design, and results for tests related to internationalization features of current browsers. Work on these practical initiatives is not funded by the Thematic Network project, but participants in the Thematic Network will meet to provide input on their development and support for their use.

B1.2. EU and national dimension Recognizing the opportunities and challenges that Europe’s diversity provides, the 2008 Commission Communication on multilingualism available at http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/pdf/com/2008_0566_en.pdf sets out aims to both capitalise on


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

the opportunities of and address the challenges of Europe’s multilingual heritage, in terms of enabling greater multilingual skills among European citizens and supporting the use of regional and minority languages in Europe. The purpose of this Thematic Network is to explore and make recommendations for improving standards and best practices related to the World Wide Web. The Web is today one of the most significant technologies involved in enabling widespread use of regional and minority languages, the understanding of other’s languages through conversion of one language to another, the coexistence of multiple languages within a single technology or content, and opportunities for language-learning. However, the Web is still young, and there are barriers to multilingual support that still need to be addressed, and best practices that need to be followed more widely to maximise its multilingual potential. In this respect, the proposed Thematic Network is central to the policies of the EU. Section 7 of the Commission Communication refers specifically to translation and new technologies, and to the need for language-aware technologies that promote content creation in multiple languages, and the improvement of translation tools and processes. These are topics that will be given specific attention during the work of this Thematic Network proposal. The EU supports a number of projects related to multilingual or general language resources and the consortium partners are associated with a number of highly relevant current projects, such as the following: The CNGL CSET project (www.cngl.ie) is a large research project funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). This research project integrates language technology, digital content management and localisation research in a unique way. It has a research track focused on standards and guidelines for global content creation and translation, which aligns well with the MultilingualWeb initiative. Information sharing and potentially joint workshops between these two initiatives should benefit both. Microsoft Ireland is a partner in CNGL. CNGL has established some collaboration with the EuromatrixPlus project for MT. That would open a further potential collaboration point for adoption of content standards and collaboration with MT researchers to ensure that there is a good match and that MT systems are better able to handle Web content - this would also be a topic for the CNGL project which includes an MT research track also. The Rosetta Foundation was also established as a spin-off from the CNGL and the University of Limerick in Ireland to provide a localisation technology platform and infrastructure that is accessible and affordable. It is not-for-profit and is being supported by the CNGL, the LRC and industrial partners. It will maintain and develop this platform and deploy it for not-for-profit organisations. The EuroMatrixPlus Project is based on novel combinations of statistical techniques and linguistic knowledge sources as well as hybrid machine translation architectures. FLaReNet, CLARIN and LanguageGrid are examples of European (first two) or worldwide (Asian) initiatives that are mainly focused on the standardization and the use of language technologies from an academic LT perspective. The MultilingualWeb project brings in perspectives from the significant web actors with more practical and short term requirements. The synergies result from trying to accommodate the most advanced techniques in web technologies, the latest recommendations in web document annotation and the newest NLP technologies able to process in due time the huge amounts of web data. In the FLaReNet Thematic Network, which is bringing together experts in the field of LRs and LTs, standards are one of main themes of investigation and contact points between the two projects. Discussion is going on about what standards and best practices are currently available and what is still needed in the future. The CLARIN project is an example of a community-specific project focusing on linguistic data from a large number of languages. The proposed project will help to establish a common research


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities, and to lead to a better understanding of the common needs for multilingual information in this domain. The Japanese LanguageGrid initiative is an infrastructure, critically based on interoperability, aimed at improving accessibility to multilingual content and providing language services to users, by allowing new custom language services to be implemented via combination of existing ones. Nicoletta Calzolari, of CNR-ILC, is the coordinator of FLaReNet initiative and Dan Tufis, of ICIA, is also a member of FLaReNet. Nicoletta is also the Chair of the Scientific Board of the CLARIN project. Dan Tufis is the Vice-Chair of the Scientific Board of the CLARIN project. Both of them are in the expert group of the LanguageGrid initiative. They would act as liaison between MultilingualWeb project and the respective initiatives for the benefit of all these projects. The T4ME project is currently under negotiation and due to start in early 2010 and will provide a reference structure for tools, a clearinghouse for useful language resources, lexica, corpora for building language applications, tools like parsers and taggers, and will also incorporate service concepts which will harvest resources from the Web and factor them into publicly available resources. We expect to collaborate closely with the T4ME partners, particularly around the main issue of standards and interoperability. The Europeana project is a large scale initiative providing online access to European cultural heritage and knowledge. It is particularly relevant since its results are only available online, and pose the challenge of multilingual access. The LTC is involved in the MORMED and OrganiK projects, and will report on progress of these projects during workshops. We will also need to track and liaise with activities on the MONNET and COSYNE projects. SAP is involved with the MONNET project. THESEUS is a German national project supported by the BMWi (Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology), with a European and global dimension, looking at business models for the World Wide Web and other internet based networks such as the "Internet of Things" and the "Internet of Services." The European and global dimension mainly concerns language and cultural related aspects regarding the exchange and interchange of information and knowledge in automated use case scenarios that must rely on new innovative communication techniques, protocols and workflow capabilities as well as process management abilities. Examples areas are one-to-many cross-cultural translation automation, and language data exchange that is beyond current approaches such as those employed by the TAUS Data Association for translation memory content and terminology. Because some of the Network partners have direct communication with THESEUS organisations, a smooth and fruitful exchange is guaranteed. Yet another source for the cultural exchange dimension is the MEDAR Specific Support Action under the Seventh Framework Programme that deals with translation automation aspects between European countries and the Mediterranean Arabic speaking countries. UPM has applied for the project "Lingu@net World Wide" that has been selected for funding in Action KA2 Languages Multilateral Projects 2009, Lifelong Learning Programme of the EC. UPM is also responsible for the Technology Work-package in the project, which includes all the IT technical work necessary to implement and integrate new languages and new resources in Lingu@net Europa. Possible synergies between the MultilingualWeb network and Lingu@net World Wide include the following: • Support of translation tools for the creation of multilingual web sites. Advancing the integration of translations tools using XLIFF and TMX standards with CMS would facilitate the process of adding more languages to Lingu@net World Wide. At the same time, the progress in that integration could benefit from a practical case such as Lingu@net World Wide.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

• Usability and accessibility of multilingual web sites. Getting to know the implications in usability and accessibility when adding more languages to a site, or when having pages that combine different languages. As a follow-on to previous multilingual web projects and contracts, UPM also has students working on the development of open-source software as part of their master thesis project. For example, one of these projects will release a web based tool to facilitate the integration of translations in CMSs.

B2. IMPACT

B2.1. Expected impact and outcomes The project Web site will be the main host for the information arising from the project. The W3C site is central to the Web, and carries substantial credibility as a source of information. The workshops will be announced on the W3C web site, which will guarantee high visibility. This will be instrumental in increasing the impact of the project on those involved in engineering multilingual Web solutions. In addition, although the project is focused on the European region, the W3C is global in scope, and has the ability to relay the information generated by this project to people all around the world. The project will gather together experts who are involved in many different aspects of multilingual web content development to discuss and share experiences with existing standards and best practices. The knowledge that is pooled in the workshops will be reported in documents that will be made available publicly and will be well publicised in a number of different ways. This will lead to greater awareness of available standards and best practices, which should in turn lead to broader and faster adoption of them. One of the assets of this Thematic Network is the diversity that it brings to the table. This means that it will have an impact that ranges over a wide range of stakeholders in the multilingual Web, and creates synergies rather than silos in its outcomes. The partners not only bring a wealth of experience to the table, but have the ability to influence and spread the word among large numbers of people. Most are regularly involved in speaking at conferences, participating in other workshops, and other means by which information is disseminated throughout the industry. In addition, a number of other channels will be available to spread information about the workshop outputs, as described in section 3.4 The workshops should also point out gaps in the standards and best practises and focus attention on where the industry should be moving in order to further improve efficiency and effectiveness for the multilingual Web. These topics should further address the reduction of overheads and increase the ability to capitalise on the rich multilingual and multicultural contribution of online communities. A number of partners represent organizations that have the ability to directly influence work on gaps in the standards and best practices, and have at their heart a mission to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the creation and management of multilingual content. All partners are represented by influential people in their respective fields who have the ability to effect change in the industry. The breadth of experience on the partner list will also be a significant contribution to the success of the project. Partners include organizations working with browser development, social networking tools, localization tools, localization services, large content management systems, standards for Web and multilingual technologies, language resources, computational linguistics, data mining and archival, user and vendor forums, and more. Partner representatives are or have been associated with


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

many important groups and initiatives, including examples such as OASIS, DocBook, RELAX NG, XSL, ITS, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, OSCAR, OAXAL. FlaReNet, ISO/TC 37/SC4WG4, ISO TDG12, ELRA, Unicode, Glossasoft, XLIFF, etc. Furthermore, workshop discussions will be open to public attendees, not just the partners. This should provide further representation of key industry players and points of view than the already diverse set of partners who have volunteered to participate. The partners and public participating in the workshops, and the recommendations arising from those meetings will address the creation and management of multilingual Web sites and content, the minimisation of costs and inefficiencies associated with producing multilingual content, and ways of capitalising on the rich multilingual and multicultural contribution of online communities. The workshops and their deliverables will also significantly raise the visibility and adoption of standards and best practices in these areas. In addition to the benefits brought to the project by the expertise of the partners, the thematic network should carry benefit to the activities that the partners are involved in that dovetail with the aims of the network. We include here some of the synergies with industrial partners. Companies like Facebook have made a great deal of investment in technology and process to help web developers in creating multilingual web applications. Facebook believes that the MultilingualWeb project will enable the web community at large to benefit from such technologies and processes, especially when complemented by the collective knowledge of like companies. Facebook is very active in promoting open source initiatives. For a list of contributions, see developers.facebook.com/opensource.php. Browser developer, Opera is heavily involved in work with standards body W3C and would look to communicate work on the multilingual web to other groups within Opera feeding in to specification development within the W3C. Such collaboration would help to ensure that individual initiatives were harmonised and do not conflict in any way. Henny Swan's main remit at Opera is to work with developers raising awareness of web standards and universal access. She contributes to the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group at the W3C and works internally to ensure that Opera products are usable for people with disabilities. She is also Co-Lead of the Web standards (WaSP) project Internationalisation Group (ILG). WaSP actively promotes web standards globally, and the ILG chapter specifically promotes internationalisation and localisation. A large part of the work being done currently is to localise WaSP's InterAct web standards Curriculum for use in 21 countries. Opera has also developed a Web Standards Curriculum for developers and designers to learn how to write better Web pages (http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/). Lionbridge is also involved in other standards organization such as OASIS. For OASIS they are part of the XLIFF technical committee, and believe that a liaison with XLIFF could facilitate the exchange and management of translation. Lionbridge is also currently working on the launch of its translation platform, as an SaaS commercial offering. This will provide the opportunity to organizations (large or small) or independent translators to benefit from the translation technology that Lionbridge has used to deliver its services. The discussions about standards in the MultilingualWeb project will feed into that development. TAUS has been enabling the sharing of language resources in a single repository, which will stimulate innovation and automation in the translation industry. In pilot projects undertaken TDA members have already proven that translation leveraging and MT performance using larger shared corpora of parallel text can increase by 30% to 50%. The MultilingualWeb network will give TAUS access to more organizations that can benefit from the shared data repository and the experiences of TAUS members.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

TAUS is also starting a Tracker that will aggregate relevant data and experiences from all MT users. This service will allow all participating organizations to quickly find specifications of MT systems, use cases and best practices. TAUS is very open to collaborate with other parties in developing this into a very valuable resource. SAP believes that, due to its participants, the network will create a possibility for direct exchange between many important players for the global web. Coverage reaches from the World Wide Web Consortium as a central steward for core Web standards such as HTML, to the Localization Industry Standards Association as a major umbrella organization related to localization and translation services (with its own set of standards which for example with regard to Term Base eXchange have found its way to the International Organization for Standardization). The network's main SAP contact is working in the context of standardization bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS). This involvement should provide good opportunities to carry information into both directions: to the network and from the network. In addition to the workshops, the project will provide support for the development of practical work items that will be developed by the W3C. These are largely, but not exclusively, focused on encouraging the uptake of standards and best practices in the main backbone of Web content, HTML and CSS. The impact of these practical work items will be to actively spread best practices and guidelines related to existing Web standards throughout large numbers of content developers and authors, and promote the uptake of best practices and standards in major browsers. One such work item is an internationalization checker, which will be used by content developers all over Europe and the world to check Web page markup for conformance to standards and best practices. A tool of this kind can provide a very attractive, and therefore effective, way for content developers to learn about standards and best practices. Another item is a set of training materials, which will be freely available for educators to teach people about basic standards and best practices related to designing for the multilingual Web. This is in addition to the fact that methodologies from different fields of knowledge will be shared and compared throughout the project. A third work item relates to browser tests. These tests have already been influential in helping major browser developers recognise and improve support for multilingual users. For example, W3C tests for complex script support in Web fonts recently played a role in improving font-linking features in several major browsers. This is just one example of how the tests have directly impacted multilingual support in major browsers. Various indicators will be used to measure the impact of the project. These are described in detail later in the proposal. They include the following:

- Workshop audiences, in terms of quantity and quality - The number of hits for the documents containing workshop outputs - The number of hits for the internationalization checker - The number of test results provided for internationalization-related browser tests

B2.2. Long term viability Project partners include bodies and groups concerned with improving the multilingual industry through the development of standards and best practices and dissemination of information about them. These include, for example, people involved with W3C, TAUS, LISA, LRC and FlaReNet.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

These players are well placed to foster adoption of and future work on the recommendations arising out of the workshops. The mailing lists described in the next section will continue to provide a forum for discussion for as long as is needed after the end of the project. The practical work items developed by the W3C with the input of the partners will be for the use of the general public and will be developed under open source licences. The usefulness of these items in assuring better support for the multilingual Web in content creation and browsers will have only just begun by the end of the project, and will continue into the foreseeable future. Reports and minutes will also be hosted and kept available on the project Web site, which, since it is managed by the W3C, has a commitment to stable, long-term access by the public. Several organizations involved in the network have the capability of taking the network further after completion of this project. Towards the end of the project the partners will explore establishing some continuing liaison/coordination mechanism. Partners can also discuss whether they would like to continue the work under the umbrella of the W3C as a special interest group within the Internationalization Activity.

B2.3. Availability of common results, consensus bui lding, openness, sustainability Shortly after each workshop, the minutes and recommendations of the workshops will be publicly available from the project Web site, which enjoys a prestigious position with regards to site ranking and attracts a large number of visitors. In 2008 the site saw a daily average of 10.1 million page views on www.w3.org. They will additionally be publicised via the sites of other partners, a twitter channel will be set up to report news and events in real time, and other means of reporting information, such as blog postings, tagged workshop photos on flicker, and other social networking channels. These factors will assist in raising the visibility of the discussions that take place far above and beyond the confines of the project partner organizations and the timeframe of the project itself. The ongoing milestones in the development of the project will be announced on the W3C Internationalization Activity home page (http://www.w3.org/International/) and will be available via its related RSS feeds. Workshop discussions will be supplemented by a minimum of three publicly-archived mailing lists, hosted and maintained by the W3C. One mail list will be for coordination of workshop logistics, admin-related activities, etc. and will be mainly for partners. Another mail list will be for general communication on any of the topics addressed during the project, and will be a publicly viewable list, that can also be subscribed to by the general public. A third mailing list will support discussion of the practical work items. These mailing lists will be available for use throughout the project, and beyond. The W3C has a great deal of experience in hosting community mailing lists of this type, and effective methods for maintaining them, granting subscriber access, spam control, etc. There will also be a publicly accessible project home page for coordinating work and to point to workshop and face-to-face outputs, ongoing status of work, etc. This will be on the w3c site. At any time it is needed a wiki can be set up, also hosted by W3C, to support collaborative working. In addition to this, the workshops themselves will be open to participation by non-partners, and we will specifically target other key players in the industry by invitations to ensure that they are also involved in the discussion process.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Further dissemination of information by the partners will be strongly encouraged through conference presentations, publications and specialised training courses. Findings will also be disseminated via conference channels such as Unicode, LISA, Localization World, and other major conferences. The practical work items will be hosted on the W3C site, and will be for the use of the general public. The work items do not constitute funded deliverables of the project, but their development will be strongly influenced by the partners, and their contributions under the umbrella of the thematic network will be recognised. These items will be developed under open source licences and are resources that will be available to the general public. Partners will be expected to contribute support in the expectation that their ideas will be freely available to the public, once incorporated into the work items.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

B3. IMPLEMENTATION

B 3.1. Consortium and key personnel Partners represent a wide spread of stakeholders in the multilingual Web and much of the value of the project proposal lies in the quality of the partners represented. Public participation in the workshops will further expand and strengthen this wide view of the issues. The fact that partners are drawn from such a range of fields, considering the synergy and contacts that will be produced by such meetings, constitutes a valuable aspect of the project. The 20 funded partners and 2 non-funded partners represent entities from 15 different European countries. The following table summarises the specialities of the partners. Detailed information and personnel information is given in the remainder of this section, after the table. Partner Area of activity Program

committee Workshop attendee

Workshop host

Practical work items

W3C/ERCIM World Wide Web Standards

X X X

Bioloom Group Semantic technologies, Machine learning, Language technology

X X X

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-ILC)

Language resources and technologies, FlaReNet

X X X X

Facebook Ireland Social networking, Localization

X X X

University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Potsdam

Information sciences, Digital libraries

X X X

Institut Josef Stefan Machine learning, Data mining

X X X

Institutul de Cercetari Pentru Intelegentia Articificiala (ICIA)

Computational linguistics, Multilingual web services

X X X X

Language Technology Centre

Translation tools, Language services

X X X

Lionbridge Belgium Language services, Translation tools

X X X

Microsoft Ireland Research

Localization, localization tools, Browser development

X X X

Opera Software Browser development, Localization

X X X

SAP Translation services, Content engineering

X X X

Translation Automation User Society (TAUS)

Translation technologies and services user community

X X X

(AALTO) Machine translation, Text mining, Machine learning

X X X


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Universidad de Oviedo (ILTO)

Multilingual web technologies , multilingualism, usability, transaltion research

X X X X

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)

Multilinguism, Accessibility, Usability

X X X X

University of Limerick (LRC)

Localization research and education

X X X X

Vysokaskola Ekonomicka v Praze (UoE)

Markup, Electronic publishing Systems

X X X

Transware Ltd (WeLocalize)

Language services, Globalization consulting

X X X

XML-INTL Ltd. Open standards-based translation technology

X X X

Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) (non-funded partner)

Localization industry association, Standards

X X

European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (non-funded partner)

Institutional translation services

X X X X

The roles for all partners are largely the same. All, except LISA, are expected to attend and participate in the workshops and face-to-face meetings that constitute the core of the project. All are also expected to participate in program committee work prior to each workshop to help create workshop agendas, proposing themes and topics for discussion, and reviewing position papers for selection of presenters at the workshop and reviewing the workshop deliverables. Note that the workshops will be open to public participation, so the discussions will not be solely driven by the partners. Members of the public who wish to participate in and present ideas at the workshop will be asked to submit a brief position statement. The program committee will select proposed public attendees on the basis of these position statements. Several partners have also expressed a desire to provide facilities for the workshops. This being a project related to multilingualism, it will be an advantage to hold meetings in diverse locations around Europe as it will increase exposure of attendees to a variety of local people, cultures and issues, and should also make it easier for local people to attend. Partners will be encouraged to discuss or work on specific topics in more detail between workshops by drawing together groups of interested individuals into task forces. The project mailing lists can be used to support the task force discussions, and the W3C can make available teleconference facilities, IRC channels, and such where needed. The use of a Joomla-based web site provides opportunities for partners in such task forces to publish information to the site relevant to their discussions, and the W3C can also provide wikis to support such collaborations where needed. Partners will also be expected to review and provide feedback on the associated ‘practical work items’. This involves participation in face-to-face meetings, but will also involve discussions on a mailing list. It is also expected that some partners will submit test results to support the knowledge provided on the W3C site about the behaviour of major browsers vis-a-vis multilingual support. Partners should also look for and champion opportunities to provide training using the materials developed by the W3C with the input of the partners.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

The W3C will provide resources and know-how to develop the internationalization checker tool, put together the training curriculum and compile the results for the internationalization tests. These deliverables build upon work already done at the W3C. As mentioned previously, the W3C is able to provide support in terms of mailing lists, wikis, teleconferencing, etc. It also has a lot of experience in conducting successful workshops and in managing working groups.

Funded partners 1: ERCIM/W3C The coordinator for the MultilingualWeb Network is ERCIM, which is the parent organisation for the European part of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The W3C is an organization of currently over 400 members worldwide from research and industry, headed by the Web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It has considerable experience in hosting public workshops and bringing together diverse constituents to formulate common plans. The project will be supported out of the Internationalization Activity of the W3C, which has been involved since 1998 in producing specifications, guidelines, and best practices, in doing internationalization education and outreach, and in reviewing new Web technologies for internationalization issues. The W3C will be looking for opportunities to develop standards or guidelines for Web internationalization from ideas that are discussed during the project. It will also commit to development of practical work items associated with the project.

Richard Ishida is the Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C. He has worked with a wide range of W3C technical Working Groups dealing with internationalisation issues in emerging Web technologies, such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, SVG, SSML, XML, WAI, etc. He also added guidelines, education and outreach to the work of the Internationalisation Activity. He previously worked for Xerox and has a background in translation and interpreting, translation tools, and internationalization consultancy. Celine Bitoune is ERCIM Projects group financial coordinator. She has written two financial guidelines to European Commission financial rules for participation in funded projects (Frameworks 6 and 7), widely distributed within and beyond the ERCIM consortium. And she has recently taken over the coordination of 2 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) projects: WAI-AGE and MobiWeb2.0 (CSA).

2: Bioloom Group was founded in 2001 as an independent ICT consulting organisation with a focus on business intelligence and business process management in strong interaction with semantic technologies, machine learning and advanced multilingual language technologies to deliver intelligent solutions for global transcultural communication. The bioloom way also includes information bionics where we learn from nature's information handling and processing, and investigate how these findings can be effectively transformed into efficient technical and computational solutions. Bioloom Group's customer base ranges from traditional ICT enterprises to organisations in the fields of life sciences and bioinformatics. Within the MultilingualWeb network Bioloom Group will contribute and share with the community its knowledge on transcultural communication and computational intelligence, and work collectively on new designs and solutions for the evolution of a transcultural, multilingual web generation.

Jörg Schütz is a computer scientist and IT philosopher with over 30 years of business experience in different ICT fields ranging from databases through language technologies to virtualization. He has consulted and lectured world-wide, is a member of several scientific and industry associations, and advises the European Commission as an expert, evaluator and reviewer. He was also active in standardisation bodies, and working groups on data and knowledge exchange formats such as ITS, OLIF, SALT and TMF. Jörg has studied computer science, mathematics and medicine, holds a PhD in AI and Machine Translation, and received a Honorary Professorship for Machine Translation and for Information Sciences from the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken, Germany. In 2001, he founded the


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Bioloom Group, an organization that consults on and develops solutions for the next generation of intelligent computing.

3: CNR-ILC (I) - Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” del CNR has a recognised international and national leadership in the area of Language Resources and Technologies under technological, scientific, political and strategic aspects. Its mission is to improve and foster language technologies through new methods and techniques for managing digital content and understanding human language. It promotes basic research in areas where the need of significant innovations emerges, fostering the synergies among different disciplinary competences, and ensuring synergies between basic and applied research. It is the promoter of innovative objectives in the international community, by fostering new “paradigms” in the field. In synergy with European initiatives, it is the pioneer of the vision of an open and distributed infrastructure of resources and tools, to be integrated in various services and systems, and has launched the notion of Language Resources as the central component of the linguistic infrastructure. CNR-ILC has coordinated many EC projects, some in the standardisation area as EAGLES and ISLE, and is represented in the most influential international/ national Committees, Boards, and Associations. Currently, CNR-ILC is the coordinator of the EC eContentplus Thematic Network “Fostering Language Resources NETwork” (FLaReNet), and is part of the ESFRI CLARIN and KYOTO FP7 projects. CNR-ILC will act in synergy with the major international initiatives for standards and interoperability, such as those of various ISO Committees it is leading or is a member of.

Nicoletta Calzolari Zamorani. Director of research at CNR-ILC. Honorary PhD (Copenhagen University). She has promoted internationally the fields of Language Resources and Standardisation and has a long experience in the coordination of many international, European and national projects and strategic initiatives, currently coordinating the FLaReNet EC Thematic Network. Member of ICCL, Chair of the Scientific Board of CLARIN, Convener of the ISO/TC 37/SC4WG4 and of ISO TDG12, member of ACL Exec, past Vice-President of the ELRA Board, chair of the ELRA PCom, founding member of the Italian Forum for HLT, member of many International Committees and Advisory, Executive or Editorial Boards (among which ELSNET, SENSEVAL, ECOR, SIGLEX, WRITE). Conference Chair of LREC since 2004. General Conference Chair for COLING-ACL'2006. Chief co-editor of the International Journal Language Resources and Evaluation (Springer). Monica Monachini Senior Researcher at CNR-ILC. Field of expertise: computational lexicology and lexicography, lexical semantics, methods and models for the developments of lexicons and lexical architectures. Active in many standardisation activities for harmonising information in lexica and corpora. Involved in international projects for Language Engineering and standardisation initiatives. Member of the EAGLES, SIMPLE and ISLE Working Groups. Technical responsible for the Pisa team in the eContent INTERA, and LIRICS projects, Currently involved in the FLaReNet Thematic Network and FP7 KYOTO project. UNI delegate for ISO/TC37/SC4; ISO TDG13 convenor. Claudia Soria, PhD. Researcher at CNR-ILC. Field of expertise: computational lexicology and lexicography, lexical semantics, methods and models for the developments of lexicons and lexical architectures, representation of language resources, metadata. Active in many standardisation activities for harmonising information in lexica and corpora. Involved in international projects for Language Engineering and standardisation initiatives. Member of the ISLE Working Groups. Involved in European projects INTERA, LIRICS, CLARIN, FLaReNet, KYOTO. UNI delegate for ISO/TC37/SC4: WG4, TDG7 and TDG2 expert.

4: Facebook Ireland, founded in February 2004, is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world. Facebook is in 57 languages, and that number is growing. Their ‘crowd-sourcing’ model for localization will be of particular interest to the consortium.

Ghassan Haddad is the Director of Localization at Facebook, where he is responsible for defining and implementing the company's globalization strategy, including its crowd-sourcing model. Prior to Facebook, he was Director of Software Engineering and Localization at PayPal where he was responsible for enabling PayPal as a payment solution in almost two hundred countries, 30+ currencies, and 15+ languages. He has over twenty years of experience in academia, language research & technology, management, and software development. He was Assistant Professor at Iowa State University and has held several middle and upper management positions at Intergraph, Berlitz, eTranslate, PayPal and now Facebook. Ghassan holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

5: The University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Potsdam has a focus on information sciences, which encompasses the areas of archivists, librarians and documentation specialists. In all three areas, the Web has become a major part of education and research / industry projects. In addition, the creation of digital libraries with multilingual content is a key work item for the future of library and information sciences. The University will contribute to the proposed project by bringing in the perspective of multilingual digital libraries and other cultural heritage institutions, like: requirements and best practises for creating and accessing multilingual online library catalogues, building bridges between monolingual library information systems (e.g. classifications, thesauri) with (semantic) web technologies, and evaluating relations between standards in the library area vs. the web area. The last topic will focus on standards about language identification, which currently are applied in a heterogeneous way across library and web communities. The contribution in this area will be complemented by implementations, based on existing work by the key personnel.

Felix Sasaki has more than 10 years experience in dealing with research and industry topics related to the multilingual web. In his PhD and research work he examined the benefits of web technologies for representing, exchanging and processing multilingual data, like linguistic corpora as a basis for natural language processing. During his time in the Internationalization Activity of W3C, he contributed to internationalization aspects of emerging web technologies, and implemented several key internationalization technologies himself. In his current position at University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam, he is building bridges between the library and archives world and the web, with a focus on multilingual applications.

6: Institut Josef Stefan (JSI) is the central research institution for natural sciences in Slovenia. It consists of over 900 researchers within 25 departments working in the areas of computer science, physics, and chemistry and biology. The Department of Knowledge Technologies is one of the largest European research groups working in the areas of machine learning and data mining. It has approx. 50 researchers covering different aspects of data analysis with special emphasis on textual data, social networks/graphs, complex data visualization, cross modal analysis, temporal (stream) data and in particular on scalability of approaches and deployability of research results in real world environments. In the recent years the research shifted towards semantic technologies, where the main goal is to combine modern statistical data analytic techniques with more traditional logic based knowledge representations and reasoning techniques. The department developed several software tools, among others: Text-Garden suite of text mining tools, OntoGen system for ontology learning, Document-Atlas for complex visualization.

Marko Grobelnik is expert in the areas of analysis and knowledge discovery in large complex data bases. In particular, the areas of expertise comprise: Data Mining, Text Mining, Semantic Technologies, Network Analysis, and Complex Data Visualization.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Marko collaborates with major European and US academic institutions and industries such as Microsoft Research, New York Times, Accenture, Nature and British Telecom. Marko is author of several books in the area of machine learning, data mining and semantic technologies and authors of many scientific papers. He is also W3C AC representative for JSI, CEO of the company Quintelligence and associated with the company Cycorp Europe.

7: Institutul de Cercetari pentru Intelegentia Arti cificiala (ICIA) is one of the centres of excellence in Romania with a high scientific reputation, built in its 15 years of existence by an active presence in the international research community. It is also the internet service provider for the institutes of the Romanian Academy (62 institutes). The results obtained at ICIA in POS tagging, chunking, word alignment, parsing, word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, language learning, question answering in open domains, wordnet development, ontology based language processing have received international recognition been reported in major conferences and used by various researchers all over the world. They developed a platform of multilingual web-services (SOAP & UDDI & WSDL), widely used (for Romanian and English) by various partners in Europe and USA.

Professor Dan Tufis is the director of the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of the Romanian Academy and professor of Computational/Statistical Linguistics and Machine Translation at the University "A.I. Cuza". He participated in more than 25 international projects and authored more than 200 papers, published in peered reviewed conferences and journals. Dr. Radu Ion is senior researcher at ICIA and he leads the research in the area of question answering for open domains. He developed several largely used NLP tools (tokenizer, POS tagger, lemmatizer, word aligner, etc). He is also responsible for internet service provision by our institute.

8: The Language Technology Centre (LTC) possesses more than 16 years of extensive experience in evaluating, developing and implementing advanced language technology solutions. LTC has an excellent international reputation as a language service provider, software house and consultancy. LTC prides itself on its high profile multilingual service team that offers and co-ordinates a multitude of language services. Also, LTC offers consulting services in multilingual process optimization, business information and workflow management systems. In addition, LTC has a comprehensive range of computer-assisted language services including computer-assisted translation, software and website localization. LTC provides these services to commercial organisations as well as EU bodies. LTC has been offering an array of ICT services around its products such as product customization, Software as a Service, training and support since it began selling software. The use and promotion of best practices and multilingual content management on the Web of multilingual sites has been a business driver for LTC for many years.

Dr. Adriane Rinsche, Managing Director of LTC, founded the company in 1992 and continues to lead design for the company’s products, which include LTC Worx and LTC Communicator. She designed the first and most mature business information system for the language industry, known today as LTC Organiser. Rinsche has a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Bonn University in Germany Philip McConnell has a MBA, an honours degree in Computer Science and over 25 years in the software industry, is currently the company’s Head of Software Engineering responsible for maintenance of numerous multilingual Web sites, and portals.

9: Lionbridge Belgium draws on the expertise of over 4000 employees and 10,000 linguistic resources, to cover over 100 languages and has a long history of managing large-scale translation and


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

language-related projects in areas as varied as IT, automotive, eLearning, software localisation, life sciences, entertainment, telecommunications, aerospace, and public affairs. Lionbridge also specialises in face-to-face, over-the-phone, and simultaneous interpretation as well as interpreter training and testing. Finally, translating for the European institutions and other EU or national public bodies and NGOs is another core business of our company. Lionbridge has adopted a number of integrated tools (content management system, web-based translation memory platform, etc.) that accelerate production and ensure consistency of global content from authoring through translation and publication. Because i18n is a critical first step in producing a globally acceptable software product, our goal is to educate our customers on how to develop global-ready applications that are ultimately easier and less expensive to localise.

Jeff Knorr is currently the Director of Internationalization Services for Lionbridge. He has been involved in the globalization industry for over 16 years, with 10 of those years spent leading the Lionbridge I18n Services team. Having a formal education and degree in Electrical Engineering, Jeff began his globalization career in 1993 as an engineer for International Language Engineering (ILE). Since that time he has been involved in many different areas of localization and internationalization services. Joachim Schurig is the translation memory architect and Senior Technical Director for Logoport. He joined Lionbridge in February 2005 with Lionbridge's acquisition of Logoport. Prior to Lionbridge, he was the managing director of Logoport Software in Berlin, Germany, a company he founded in 2000 to develop Logoport and introduce Internet translation memory services to the industry. Eric Blassin is currently the vice president of language technology for Lionbridge. Eric has 20 years experience in the localization and technology industries. At Lionbridge he has managed several regional operations, worldwide technology and IT systems and, most recently, the successful rapid deployment of Logoport. He began his career with Digital Equipment Corp. as engineer in the International Systems engineering group and was involved in the internationalization architecture of several platforms. Jim Compton is currently Worldwide Director of Technical Services Excellence, leads the global technical services team and focuses on: empowering Lionbridge Operations to drive its process and technology offering along a vector of constant improvement, developing Lionbridge's culture of innovation and collaboration, and addressing emerging areas of need.

10: Microsoft Ireland Research, founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. The Microsoft European Development Center in Ireland (Microsoft Ireland Research), is focused on engineering excellence. It conducts the full lifecycle of software development from research and development, to engineering and localisation across many of Microsoft's different business groups. EDC is involved a wide array of different projects from working on the Windows Media Centre, to Windows Live development, security, anti-virus research, and the localisation of over one hundred products and services, from Microsoft Office to MSN and the Xbox 360, into over 30 languages. The teams at EDC collaborate with sister centres based in Denmark, India and China and are part of the Microsoft Product Group R&D organisation.

Dag Schmidtke is a Senior International Project Engineer responsible for localization language technology in the Microsoft Office International Product Group. He joined Microsoft in 1991 and has extensive experience in software and content localization. He has completed Masters degrees in linguistics and computational linguistics, and currently works with web adoption and deployment of machine translation and other language services, as well as Global English authoring guidelines and related tool support initiatives within Microsoft.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

11: Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser, a multi-lingual, high-quality, multi-platform product for a wide range of platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products – including Mac, PC and Linux computers, mobile phones and PDAs, game consoles, and other devices like the Nintendo Wii, DS, Sony Mylo, and more. Opera’s vision is to deliver the best Internet experience on any device. Opera’s key business objective is to earn global leadership in the market for PC/desktops and embedded products. Opera’s main business strategy is to provide a browser that operates across languages, devices, platforms and operating systems, and can deliver a faster, more stable and flexible Internet experience than its competitors.

Henny Swan, Web Evangelist, is also co-lead of the Web Standards Project International Liaison Group and has a strong background in mobile and web accessibility. She also contributes to the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines working group. She blogs at www.iheni.com, www.opera.com/developer and www.webstandards.org. She will be contributing to this project together with Pal Eivind Jacobsen Nes who manages internationalisation within Opera.

12: SAP AG (www.sap.com) delivers products and services that help accelerate business innovation for its customers. Today, customers in more than 120 countries run SAP applications – from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small businesses and midsize companies to suite offerings for global organizations. SAP Language Services (SLS) is SAP’s central translation services unit. It draws on a network of Localization Service Providers and various technologies to provide services for over 30 languages.

Christian Lieske, one of SAP's Knowledge Architects, is a member of SLS. He works on internationalization, and translation approaches with a focus on content engineering and process automation. He is a long time contributor to the OASIS XLIFF Technical Committee, and co-editor of the W3C Recommendation "Internationalization Tag Set".

13: The Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) is a community of users and providers of translation technologies and services. The ambition of the TAUS community is to translate a manifold of content in an increasing number of languages through technology adoption, service innovation and cross-industry collaboration. TAUS focuses on the whole spectrum of authoring, translation and globalization processes and technologies. Simply by enabling organizations to share relevant information, identify good practices, find technologies and experts, benchmark processes and leverage their buying influence, TAUS helps companies to save management time, avoid the risk of mistaken decisions, and save money. And by exchanging experiences and insights, TAUS members cut back dramatically on the learning and implementation costs of new translation technologies.

Jaap van der Meer is a language industry pioneer and visionary who was involved with pioneering term extraction and translation memory software and standards initiatives for the localization industry in the 80s. He inspired and funded the founding meetings of the LISA organization. He was President and CEO of ALPNET from 1997 till 2004. In 2005, he established the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS), along with founding members from most of the leading IT companies.

14: AALTO-KORKEAKOULUSAATIO (the merger of three Finnish universities: The Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and The University of Art and Design Helsinki). Department of Information and Computer Science (ICS) is the leading computer science department in Finland with 8 professors and about 100 staff altogether. The department has been selected for 1994–1999, 2000–2005 and 2006–2011 as one of the Finnish national Centres of Excellence in Research. The department is an active member in the PASCAL and PASCAL2 networks


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

of excellence under the EC 6th and 7th framework programmes. The Computational Cognitive Systems group at AALTO/ICS conducts research on artificial systems that combine perception, action, reasoning, learning and communication. A specific focus is in adaptive language technology. Central research themes of the group include adaptive machine translation, modeling of conceptual spaces, automatic and language independent extraction of terminologies, and learning ontologies from examples.

Dr. Timo Honkela, Chief Research Scientist, is the head of the Computational Cognitive Systems research group at AALTO. In the 1980s, Honkela was responsible for semantic processing in the Kielikone project that was developing a large-scale natural language interface for Finnish. He served at VTT Information Technology as a project manager in Glossasoft project (EU Telematics, 1993-95) that developed methods and tools for dealing with internationalisation and localisation in software development. Recently, Honkela has been responsible director in the EU-funded MedIEQ project that developed quality labeling methods for web-based medical text resources using semantic technologies. He had an initiating role in the development of the Websom method for visual information retrieval and text mining. Honkela has served as a professor both at AALTO and at the UIAH Media Lab. He has published approximately one hundred scientific articles in the areas of language technology, knowledge engineering, statistical machine learning and cognitive modeling. He is a former chairman of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society. Honkela is currently the chair of the IFIP working group on knowledge representation and reasoning (WG 12.1) and a member of the executive board of European Neural Network Society.

15: University of Oviedo (ILTO) has international expertise in two fields relevant for the thematic network: web technologies and languages and translation. As regards the first area of knowledge, the Master in Web Engineering provides specific training on web architecture, design and standards to produce usable and accessible websites. Besides, some researchers from the field of Philology and Translation Studies have been studying the translation of websites, the new textual model of hypertexts and the implications of the choice of languages and other cultural aspects in websites. Recently a new research group, ILTO (Internationalization, Localization, Translation, Oviedo) has been formed in the University of Oviedo from the convergence of researchers and lecturers from these disciplines, among which are the participants in the thematic network, Cristina Valdés, José Emilio Labra, César Acebal and Alberto Fernández Costales.

Cristina Valdés is a lecturer in the University of Oviedo, where she teaches British Culture, Translation and English Language. She has completed a PhD on advertising translation and has developed her research towards website translation and communication. Now she coordinates the research group ILTO (Internationalization, Localization, Translation, Oviedo) in the University of Oviedo. She has experience in international training and research programmes on translation and inter-cultural communication.

16: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM ) is the oldest and largest of the Spanish Technical Universities. UPM currently has more than 3,000 faculty members, around 38,000 undergraduate students, and 6,000 postgraduate students. UPM’s Schools cover most Engineering disciplines, including Telecommunications and Computer Science. UPM has a strong commitment to R&D and Innovation. It ranks first among Spanish universities in European Union R&D funding, having around 15% of the total number of European Union funded projects. The contribution of the university to knowledge creation through its scientific publications is also very relevant. The UPM members engaged in this project are willing to share their experience in multilingualism, accessibility and usability in web design and development, acquired through projects such as Lingu@net Europa (www.linguanet-europa.org). They are committed to proposing and discussing themes for the workshops, reviewing and contributing position papers and attending the workshops, with the aim to find solutions for Multilingual CMSs based on the application of standards and best practices. They are also volunteering to host one of the meetings or workshops.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Encarna Pastor is a full professor specialising in the field of networking, multimedia applications, Internet technologies, multilingualism, accessibility and usability in web design and collaborative work environments. She has undertaken research projects in these fields and acquired an extensive research and development experience through her involvement in a number of European Commission-funded projects as well as national-funded projects in collaboration with research and industrial organizations. Luis Bellido is an associate professor specialising in computer networking, multimedia applications, and Internet technologies. In particular, he has extensive experience in multilingualism, accessibility and usability in web design and development acquired through his participation in a number of European Commission-funded projects as well as national-funded projects in collaboration with research and industrial organizations.

17: The Language Resource Centre (LRC) is a research centre of the University of Limerick, established in 1995 at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems. It is the focal point and the research and educational centre for the localisation community worldwide. The LRC works with worldwide digital publishers and their partners who are interested in future technologies and processes for globalisation, internationalisation, localisation and translation (GILT). The LRC provides relevant well researched content rich information on future trends and technologies. The Centre is a unique industry and academic collaboration which provides an unparalleled network of expertise. As part of its activities, the LRC maintains a strong online presence (www.localisation.ie) and publishes the only dedicated, peer-reviewed and scientifically indexed localisation journal Localisation Focus – The International Journal of Localisation (since 1996). The LRC also organises an annual conference (since 1996) and a summer school (since 2001). Internationally, the LRC collaborates with the W3C, OASIS and industry associations and support structures such as LISA and Localization World.

Reinhard Schäler has been involved in the localisation industry in a variety of roles since 1987. He is the founder and editor of Localisation Focus - The International Journal of Localisation, a founding editor of the Journal of Specialised Translation (JosTrans), a former member of the editorial board of Multilingual Computing (Oct 97 to Jan 07, covering 70 issues), a founder and CEO of The Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP), and a member of OASIS. He has published more than 50 articles, book chapters and conference papers on language technologies and localisation. He has been an invited speaker at EU and international government-organised conferences in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia. He is a Principal Investigator in the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS), University of Limerick, and the founder and director of the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at UL, established in 1995.

18: University of Economics, Prague - Department of Information and Knowledge Engineering specializes teaching and research in the area of knowledge representation and processing, data mining, AI, linguistics and Web technologies.

Jiří Kosek will represent the university on this project. He has more then 10 years experience in providing XML consultancy and training in Czech Republic and world-wide as well. His special focus is on documentation and electronic publishing systems. Jiří is an active member in several standardization bodies, including OASIS (DocBook TC and RELAX NG TC), W3C (XSL WG and ITS WG) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.

19: Transware Ltd (WeLocalize) was founded in 1997, and is a privately held, venture backed company. In order to increase in-house translation capacity, the company acquired Bits Translations in Germany in 2000. A merger with GSSI of Portland, OR in 2002 provided expanded geographic coverage, and enhanced both the depth and breadth of services offered. In December of


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

2005 Welocalize completed the acquisition of Connect Global Solutions in Dublin, Ireland. In 2006 Welocalize made 2 further acquisitions with M2 in the US and Transco in China. In 2007 Welocalize acquired TechIndex (Japan) and Localize (USA). Finally in 2008 Welocalize acquired Ireland based Transware for the strength of their marketing based clients and translation management workflow technology (GlobalSight). Welocalize combines specialised language services, globalization consulting, internationalization and testing solutions with a well-organized localization methodology required to translate software, e-business applications, web sites, documentation, multimedia, eLearning services, mobile applications and other electronic content and business systems into foreign languages. Welocalize specialises in the Enterprise Applications, eLearning, Life Sciences, Media and Telecommunications industries.

David Clarke currently works with Welocalize, Ireland as a Technical Manager. David has twelve years experience in the localisation industry having held engineering, senior engineering & resource management positions with Language Management International, BiTS Übersetzungen (later acquired by Welocalize), Bowne Global Solutions and Connect Global Solutions (acquired by Welocalize in 2005). Current responsibilities include technical ownership of enterprise-level client programs, coordination of engineering and publishing production through specialised production business units, localisation workflow planning, training and technical sales-support.

20: XML-INTL is an organization dedicated to providing leading scalable Web 2.0 Computer Assisted Translation tools based on Open Standards and an Open Architecture in order to reduce the cost of translation and improve interoperability with other systems.

Andrzej Zydro ń, CTO of XML-INTL, has sat on numerous OSCAR and OASIS Open Standard Technical Committees. He worked on GMX-V (Global Information Management Metrics eXchange) standard, as well as xml:tm (XML based text memory) and heads up the new OASIS OAXAL (Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization) reference architecture technical committee. He has worked in IT since1976 at Xerox, SDL, Oxford University Press, Ford of Europe and DocZone in the fields of content management systems, document imaging, terminology systems and localization.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Non-funded partners The following partners are not eligible to participate as funded partners, but they are keen to be involved, and should bring valuable knowledge and experience to the project. The European Commission's Directorate-General for T ranslation is one of the largest translation services in the world. Located in Brussels and Luxembourg, it has a permanent staff of some 1,750 linguists and 600 support staff, and also uses freelance translators all over the world. Known as the DGT after its English initials, the service translates written text into and out of all the EU's official languages, exclusively for the European Commission.

Spyridon Pilos and Manuel Tomas Carrasco Benitez will represent the "Language applications sector of the informatics unit".

The Localization Industry Standards Association (LI SA) represents the concerns of the globalization industry: companies involved in the adaptation of business activities, products, and services for multiple markets. LISA develops open standards for the representation of linguistic assets used in globalization and the related processes of localization and internationalization. LISA will represent the concerns of commercial and governmental bodies active in globalization in the development of the CE Thematic Network and will help publicize the results. Since they do not receive funding for travel, they may not participate in the workshops in person, but they will contribute to the program committee work.

Arle Lommel is director of standards for LISA. He has worked for LISA since1998 and holds degrees in linguistics and folklore studies. He has led the standards development effort at LISA since 2003 and has also worked on business data gathering and analysis for LISA.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

B3.2a. Chosen approach The project will last for two years. It will bring together stakeholders from a range of affected areas to discuss where we are currently in terms of providing for a truly multilingual Web, and where we need to concentrate effort as we move forward.

i) Workshops The strategic objectives will be achieved with the aid of four workshops, led by the partners but open to public participation. Minutes and recommendations from the workshops will be available to the public. The first workshop will range widely over the issues of the multilingual Web, to establish a context and a general picture of the landscape. Partners will share their experience with standards and best practices, describe initiatives in which they are currently involved and establish initial proposals for topics to be treated during subsequent workshops. Note that it will be possible to continue discussions begun in the workshops using the mailing lists that will be set up for the project. The subsequent workshops will focus on standards and best practices related to more specific areas, and the areas where further standardisation or best practices are needed. The second and third workshops will focus on authoring and translation, respectively. The topic of the final workshop will be decided during the project. This enables us to focus on issues that become clear after the start of the project, and enables the group to decide which issues are of highest priority out of the many that could be discussed. The coordinator will produce an on-line document summarising the outcome of the workshops, accompanied by the workshop minutes. These will be available to the public from the W3C site, and will be announced and brought to the attention of the public in a number of ways, from news items on sites to twitter. There will also be two face-to-face meetings organized for partners, during which we will hold general project review discussions and discussions related to the practical work items described below. As Network Coordinator, the W3C has a substantial amount of experience in the running and facilitation of successful workshops and working groups. In addition, it provides world-class tools to support collaborative work, including, for example, IRC channels with command-bots for meeting management, minute-taking, etc, that can be used for face-to-face and teleconference meetings. The W3C also provides support for management of publicly-archived mailing lists, wikis and other collaborative tools as part of its normal business.

ii) Associated ‘practical work items’ Although one of the major goals of the project is to establish a network of stakeholders, it will also provide an opportunity for partners to actively support the development, in ways described below, of some practical initiatives that will be carried out in parallel at the W3C. These initiatives are aimed at supporting the development of the multilingual Web by providing an online internationalization validator, training materials related to web internationalization, and a set of test results for internationalization-related features of major browsers. The actual work on those initiatives is not funded by the Thematic Network; however they provide a channel for the network to extend its influence in an additional way. These items provide the network


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

with an opportunity to contribute to a practical outcome in addition to the strategic discussions involved in the core workshops. They also introduce an element to the network which will extend beyond the time constraints of the current project, since the items in question will continue to be refined and used long after the project terminates. The main vehicle for partners to contribute to the development of these items will be the face-to-face meetings described in the list of work packages. These will provide opportunities to review, suggest ideas for, and contribute feedback on the practical work items. Partners will also be able to contribute test results and support the delivery of training. In addition to the face-to-face meetings, there will be a dedicated mailing list to allow for discussion at any point during or after the project. The following is a description of the practical work items: [1] Internationalization checker tool: HTML authors are largely unaware of defects in their markup or style sheets related to internationalization. There is a need for a tool that authors can run on content to assess its international readiness. The tool should not only point out problem areas, but should also point to advice on what to do if a problem is reported. This will be an online tool similar to the W3C's HTML Validator and the MobileOK checker, but aimed at checking web pages for internationalization issues. For example, it will report errors, warnings and other advice to page authors on a range of topics that will include such things as character encodings and declarations, language declarations, use of directional markup, non-normalized class or id names, byte order marks, navigational links, etc. Feedback on issues identified will explain the issues in simple terms, and link to existing guidelines and best practices as well as further reading, so that it acts as an educational tool, rather than simply listing errors and warnings. Any member of the public will be able to submit any X/HTML or CSS file for checking by specifying the URI. The tool may also address other technologies, such as SVG. This work will leave behind a durable and widely useful legacy from the project work. The partners will be involved in providing ideas for included features, and reviewing and testing the checker as it is developed. (Some partners may wish to provide assistance in developing the tool. This would be by agreement with the W3C.) The tool will be available to the general public on the w3c site under open source licences (at a minimum the W3C software licence), and promoted along with the W3C's similar tools. It is expected that the tests will eventually also be integrated into the existing validators. An initial version of the internationalization checker will be available for use by the public from an early stage in the project and features and bug fixes will be added via regular updates throughout the project. [2] Internationalization training: The W3C will develop a training package for web content developers that will be made available for delivery by and to the public at large. The partners will assist in the development by providing suggestions for content and by providing review feedback at face to face meetings. Discussions may also take place on the email lists. (Some partners may wish to provide support for development of the training. This would be by agreement with the W3C.) It is expected that project partners will also be able to help by providing facilities and organising attendees for the delivery of a certain number of courses. The training package will address such things as encoding & language declarations, composite messages, dealing with text expansion, navigation, etc., an overview of Unicode and related concepts, ITS, and so forth. Training materials will be made available for download from the w3c site under open source licences (at a minimum the W3C document licence).


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

[3] Internationalization test suite results gathering: Tests for internationalization features on Web user agents are extremely useful for highlighting areas where user agent support can be improved and alerting content authors to features that may not work interoperably. The W3C already has a number of internationalization-related tests in various test suites, including tests on the i18n area of the site (http://www.w3.org/International/tests/), and is developing more on an ongoing basis. Several of the i18n tests have been picked up by browser development teams to internally promote new features and test prior to deployment. Reporting the results of the tests also significantly heightens the visibility of these features on the part of user agent developers, but also serves to educate and inform content developers. This work package will bring together partners to review tests and provide test information on test results for user agents on a range of platforms and devices. (Some partners may also wish to assist in the development of the tests themselves. This would be by agreement with the W3C.) During the face to face meetings, partners will also have the opportunity to suggest and discuss additional tests that might be useful. The test results will be made publicly available on the W3C site. The work begun in this way is expected to continue after the end of the project, as further tests are developed. The first results should be added early in the lifecycle of the project, and additional results added throughout the life of the project.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

iii) Risk analysis and contingency plan

Risk Evaluation & Description[1] Contingency Plans

Provenance; Probability; Impact

Lack of external participants in Workshop

external; medium; medium

The call for papers will be issued 3 months ahead of the Workshop days, allowing for frequent pre-checking of the registrations and to decide in time to change the date of the event or to adapt it according to the audience (focused on interests of internal partners)

Lack of internal participants in Workshop

internal; low; high

Before issuing the call for paper a consultation between partners will be launched (via email and conf call). Thus planning and interest within the consortium will be discussed at an early stage and allow the Network Coordinator to take the appropriate decisions to maximise attendance among partners.

Withdrawal of a partner due to a lack of available resource

external; low; medium

For the Workshop attendance the partners are expected to spend 10 days; thus it is unlikely that they won’t be able to allocate the resource. The Network Coordinator will work with the partner to try to find an alternative solution.

Withdrawal of a partner due to lack of interest

internal; low; medium

The Network Coordinator has paid careful attention in the choice of the partners with regards to their interest in the domain. At this stage none of the participants are at risk.

2nd F2F (general discussions about practical work items): delay in the W3C work in producing the deliverable expected to be reviewed at this stage


It has already been agreed with the W3C that the work will be done. Work on the internalization checker work will be weighted towards the early stages of the Thematic Network. This should considerably reduce the delay in providing the expected deliverable in M14 in which the meeting is scheduled. Nevertheless and according to the outcome of the 1st review, the Network Coordinator will be able to postpone this meeting. And if no dates can be found to do so, the several communication tools such as interactive communication tools (such as IRC and wikis) and mailing lists could be used to hold the discussion and provide the minimum required amount of input to the partners for the review of this work.

Failure to deliver practical work items that provide acceptable impact


The development of practical work items is based on existing experience and approaches at the W3C. These have produced highly successful initiatives in the past and the expectation is that that will help significantly here. In addition, initial versions of the work


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

items will be produced as early as possible in the project and made available for public use, and then incrementally improved during the course of the project. This will allow for early feedback, and corrective action where necessary.

[1] Evaluation is expressed through three keywords characterising the provenance (internal vs external), the probability (low, medium, high), and the impact level (low impact, medium impact, high impact) respectively.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

1st year 2nd year

ACRONYM: MultilingualWebTotal Person days distribution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Person days distribution in %

Workpackage 1: Overall Project Coordination

Task 1.1 Project Administrative and Financial CoordinationTask 1.2 Project Network Coordination

Workpackage 2: Workshop “The landscape of multilingual Web standards and best practices”

Task 2.1 Workshop (local organiser: UPM, location: Madrid, Spain)Task 2.2 DisseminationTask 2.3 Practical work items: 1st f2f meeting (local organiser: RACAI, location: Romenian)

Workpackage 3: Workshop: “Authoring the multilingu al Web”

Task 3.1 Workshop (local organiser: CNR-ILC, location: Pisa, Italy)Task 3.2 DisseminationTask 3.3 Practical work items

Workpackage 4: Workshop: “Translation tool support”

Task 4.1 Workshop (local organiser: ILTO, location: Oviedo, Spain) Task 4.2 DisseminationTask 4.3 Practical work items: 2nd f2f meeting (local organiser: LRC, location: Limerick, Ireland)

Workpackage 5: Final Workshop

Task 5.1 Workshop (local organiser: EC DGT, location: Luxembourg)Task 5.2 Dissemination

NB: reporting of task 2 activities under each WP is merged in the same deliverable than task 1 activities Members General Assembly WorkshopProject reviews F2F MeetingsPeriodic Payments Deliverables

Duration 24 months

Duration 6 months

Duration 6 months

Duration 6 months

Duration 6 months

6 m 18 m final12 m

B3.2b. Work plan

i) GANTT CHART

The following Gantt chart shows the timing of tasks and deliverables related to the achievements of the projects’ goals.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

ii) Performance Monitoring Table to show success indicators

Expected Progress Indicator No.

Objective/expected result

Indicator name Year 1 Year 2

1 Number of attendees at workshop 1

Wkshop 1 attendees

80


Wkshop 2 attendees

40


Wkshop 3 attendees

40


Wkshop 4 attendees

80

5 Number of hits on announcements of workshops on W3C I18n home page

I18n page announcements

2000 +2000 (=4000)

6 Hit counts for project website

Website hits 15,000 +20k (=35,000)

7 Views of workshop reports on project web site

Report views 200 +300 (=500)

8 External citations/mentioning of project in papers, conferences, talks, etc.

Project mentions 10 +12 (=24)

9 I18n checker in use I18n checker First version of checker produced for FTF discussions, and checker available for use by the public.

New version of checker produced.

10 Subscribers to the public mailing list set up for discussion of standards and best practices.

Mailing list subscribers

50 +20 (=70)

11 Number of tweets sent out on the W3C Twitter channel

W3C Tweets 24 +24 (=48)

Notes: Items 1-4: These are target figures. The final numbers may be slightly above those stated. Item 5: Unfortunately it is not possible to obtain figures for the number of views of announcements on the W3C home page, so the indicators will use the number of hits on news items on the W3C Internationalization home page (for which figures are available from the b2evolution logs). The expectation is that the number of hits on the W3C home page will easily be more than double the total number of hits on the I18n home page. Item 9: We will also track and report the number of hits on the i18n checker; but we cannot commit to list these hits as an indicator since the development of practical items is undertaken outside the project. Item 11: The W3C Twitter channel currently reaches around 5000 people, with interests ranging across the web space. The proposal is to post on average 2 posts per month in this forum related to the topics covered by the multilingualWeb project.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

iii) Workplan Tables tabular descriptions (registered online using NEF) These work plan tables (WT1 to WT6) specify the main elements of the work plan. They are also registered online using NEF: - WT1 Work package list - WT2 Deliverables list - WT3 Work Package Descriptions - WT4 List of Milestones – not applicable - WT5 List of tentative Reviews - WT6 Summary effort table

WT 1: Work package list:

List of work packages WP Number

WP Title Lead beneficiary number15 1

Person months 2

Start month 3

End month 4

WP01 Overall Project Coordination 1 5,5 1 24 WP02 The landscape of multilingual Web

standards and best practices 1 9 1 6

WP03 Authoring the multilingual Web Project 1 8,9 7 12 WP04 Translation tool support 1 9 13 18 WP05 Final Workshop 1 4,7 19 24 Total: 37,1 1 24

1 Number of the beneficiary leading the work in this work package. 2 The total number of person-months allocated to each work package. 3 Relative start date for the work in the specific work packages, month 1 marking the start date of the project, and all other start dates being relative to this start date. 4 Relative end date, month 1 marking the start date of the project, and all end dates being relative to this start date.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

WT2: Deliverables list NOTE for Thematic Networks: Thematic Network Proposals specify the effort in Person-Days. In the technical annex however effort is specified in Person Months. For simplicity the calculation 1 Person month = 20 Person days can be used, e.g. 4 person days would be entered in NEF as 0.2 person months. List of deliverables – to be submitted for review t o EC Deliverable Number

Deliverable Title WP number

Lead beneficiary number

Estimated indicative Person months

Nature 1

Dissemination level 2

Delivery date

D01.1 Detailed overall management and bodies management, including the quality assurance plan

01 1 0.30 R CO 2

D01.2 Report on internal and external communication tools

01 1 0.30 R CO 3

D02.1 First Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

02 1 0.20 R PU 6

D02.2 Proceedings of First workshop 02 1 0.20 R PU 6 D02.3 First F2F Reports (Minuted

recommendations) 02 1 0.20 R PU 6

D01.3 Annual Progress Report including a simplified Summary Financial Report

01 1 0.20 R CO 12

D03.1 Second Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

03 1 0.20 R PU 12

D03.2 Proceedings of Second workshop 03 1 0.20 R PU 12 D03.3 Practical work items: Report on

First implementation of internationalization checker

03 1 0.50 R PU 12

D04.3 Second F2F Reports (Minuted recommendations)

04 1 0.20 R PU 15

D04.1 Third Workshop Conference (program, minutes and key findings)

04 1 0.20 R PU 18

D04.2 Proceedings of Third workshop 04 1 0.20 R PU 18 D01.4 Annual Progress Report

including a simplified Summary Financial Report

01 1 0.20 R CO 24

D05.1 Final Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

05 1 0.20 R PU 24

D05.2 Proceedings of Final workshop 05 1 0.20 R PU 24 Total: 3.50 1 R = Report, P = Prototype, D = Demonstrator, O = Other


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

2 PU = Public PP = Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE = Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO = Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) 21 Month in which the deliverables will be available. Month 1 marking the start date of the project, and all delivery dates being relative to this start date.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

WT3: Work package descriptions WP01

One form per work package

Work package Number

WP01

Work package title Overall Project Coordination Start month 1 End month 24 Lead beneficiary number

1

Objectives The first objective of this work package will ensure the overall management, providing the legal, financial and administrative management framework for the project. The second objective is dedicated to the coordination of the Network activities, including a quality assurance process to ensure the monitoring and assessment of the progress and results across the Network.

Description of work and role of partners Legal, Financial and Administrative objectives: • Act as the project interface with the European Commission and manage all administrative and financial issues in full compliance with the work plan and the EC Grant Agreement; • Identify and implementation of indicators to measure the achievement of the Network towards its objectives (Network activity and efficiency) • Preparation and maintenance of consortium agreement; • Coordinate the preparation of the Progress Report and organise the project reviews. Networking Coordination objectives: • Supervision, support and assessment of the technical and scientific work performed by the WP’s; • Set-up the appropriate collaborative tools to support the communication exchange between partners; • Monitoring of the time schedule and implementation of any appropriate actions to correct delays; • Implementing the recommendations of EC. Task 1.1: Project Administrative and Financial Coordination [ERCIM] • Contractual management (implementation of the Grant Agreement, consortium evolution and conflict resolution) and EU reporting; • Monitoring of the central budget dedicated to the Network activities and distribution of the Community contribution; • Production of the quality plan in liaison with the NCO including monitoring of risks; • Preparation and management of the consortium agreement, which includes: - list of pre-existing know-how among the partners, - list of knowledge generated by the partner. • Meeting organisation and support (annual EC review meeting and member general assembly; • Day-to-day support to the Network Coordinator. Task 1.2: Network Coordination [W3C] This task will be lead by Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead at the W3C. The main responsibility of this task it to ensure the achievement of the work plan throughout the entire project duration and will include:


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

•Identifying, addressing and mobilising the relevant communities to ensure balanced and representative attendance of workshops • Establishment of intra-project communication tools (mailing list, shared workspace); • Coordination of the dependencies across all work packages; • Stimulating and supporting of the exchange within the project on the scientific point of view; • Preparing the Progress Reports to inform the Commission annually on the progress of the objectives of the project, including achievements and identification of any deviations compared to the work plan. Description of WP Deliverables

D01.1) Management and quality assurance plan: This deliverable will describe the internal management organisation and include in annex the consortium agreement signed between the partners. The section about the quality plan will define and describe (i) quality processes (e.g., deliverable preparation, review preparation and post-review follow-up, Workshop-specific processes such as call timelines), (ii) method and indicators which will be set-up for the tracking of the risks and appropriate type of risk response. The document will be prepared by the AFC. [month 2] D01.2) Communication and mobilisation plan: The document will outline the overall approach to mobilise the community, and the use of various means and tools for communication to achieve this goal. The W3C will set up the mailing lists and create the project web page. A document will summarize the mailing lists name and participants, provide information on the archive process at W3C (readable by the public and open to public subscription) and screen shots of the project website home page. The document will be prepared by the AFC, and signed off by the NCO. [month 3] D01.3) Annual Progress Report including a simplified Summary Financial Report: Progress report: W3C will provide a summary of the Network activities run during the period including achievements and attainment of any milestones, progress indicators and deliverables identified in Description of Work. [month 12] D01.4) Annual Progress Report including a simplified Summary Financial Report: Progress report: W3C will provide a summary of the Network activities run during the period including achievements and attainment of any milestones, progress indicators and deliverables identified in Description of Work. [month 24]


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Person Months per participant Person months per participant Participant number Participant short name Person-months per participant

1 ERCIM 5.5 Total 5.5

Schedule of relevant milestones Milestone number

Milestone name Lead beneficiary number

Delivery date from Annex I

Comments

M01.1 Advance payment N°1, N°2, final 1 M1, 14, 27 M01.2 Website set-up, communications

and collaborative tools available 1 M2

M01.3 Project reviews 1 M13, 25

List of WP Deliverables Deliverable Number

Deliverable Title Lead beneficiary number

Estimated indicative person months

Nature Dissemination level

Delivery date

D01.1 Management and quality assurance plan

1 0.30 R CO 2

D01.2 Communication and mobilisation plan

1 0.30 R CO 3


1 0.20 R CO 12


1 0.20 R CO 24

Total 1.00


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62



Work package Number

WP02

Work package title The landscape of multilingual Web standards and best practices Start month 1 End month 6 Lead beneficiary number

1

Objectives To survey the overall situation with regard to standards and best practices for the multilingual Web in Europe, identifying what is available and what gaps exist, and make preliminary plans for future workshop topic areas. Participants will share information about what they are working on in this area, and we will look for opportunities for synergy. To launch the work on the practical work items, and solicit input from partners on proposed plans for their development.

Description of work and role of partners Task 2.1: Workshop [Task leader & host: Partner UPM] The main component of this work package is a 2-day workshop with the theme “The landscape of multilingual Web standards and best practices”. During the workshop, partners and any other participants (the latter subject to acceptance of position papers) will share their experience with standards and best practices, describe initiatives in which they are currently involved and establish initial proposals for topics to be treated during subsequent workshops. This workshop will look at the landscape from a high level and range widely, whereas follow-on workshops will be more restrained in terms of subject area, and more focused on uncovering issues. Participants will also make an initial proposal for the theme of the fourth workshop. Since this workshop is largely about sharing information, efforts will be made to attract an audience of around 80 attendees. An upper limit for attendees will be decided by discussion with the partner hosting the event. Partners will be asked to assist in identifying, inviting and encouraging attendees. Details of how we will attract attendance at the workshops will be provided in the communication and mobilisation plan, but are likely to include approaches that have worked well for W3C workshops in the past. In addition to targeted invitations and announcements by partners, these include announcements on the W3C, W3C Offices, and Internationalization Activity home pages and in the events section of the W3C site. This provides very high visibility for the workshop. In addition, announcements can be made on various lists related to internationalisation and localisation and using lists of contacts from organizations such as LISA, TAUS, LRC, the Commission, etc. Also we can make use of Facebook, Linked-In and other social media, such as the W3C Twitter channel (with around 5000 readers). We may also consider press releases for this workshop and/or the final one.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Attendees will have free entry into the meeting, but will need to self-cater and support their own travel costs. Task 2.2: Dissemination [Task leader: W3C.] The coordinator will produce and announce minutes of the workshop and a summary of the conclusions of the workshop. These documents will be hosted on the project Web site. Task 2.3: Practical work items: 1st f2f meeting [Task leader: W3C. Host ICIA] Initial work will begin on the internationalization checker at the W3C and a curriculum for training materials will be drawn up for discussion. Partners will meet face-to-face to discuss the proposed features for the internationalization checker and the proposed curriculum. At the face-to-face, participants will also be introduced to the W3C internationalization test suite, in preparation for contributions to the results pool. Participants will have the opportunity to volunteer to provide results for particular platforms. The work of providing the result information will be ongoing throughout the project. Description of WP Deliverables

D02.1) First Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings): The deliverable will analyse the attendance and presentations, reproduce the minutes and the recommendations. In addition, a list of the documentation related to the organisation of the event will be provided with this document. The minutes, recommendations and presentation slides will be made available from the web site. The document will be prepared by the NCO assisted by the AFC. [month 6] D02.2) First F2F Reports (Minuted recommendations): The deliverable will analyse the attendance, reproduce the minutes and summarise discussions. It will clearly list the input received from the participants. The document will be prepared by the NCO assisted by the AFC. [month 6]


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Person Months per participant Person months per participant Participant number Participant short name Person-months per

participant

1 ERCIM 1.20 2 BIOLOOM 0.40 3 CNR 0.40 4 FACEBOOK 0.40 5 UAS POTSDAM 0.40 6 IJS 0.40 7 ICIA 0.50 8 LTC 0.40 9 LIONBRIDGE 0.40 10 MICROSOFT 0.40 11 OPERA 0.40 12 SAP 0.40 13 TAUS 0.40 14 AALTO 0.40 15 UO 0.40 16 UPM 0.50 17 UNIVERSITY OF

LIMERICK 0.40

18 VEVP 0.40 19 WELOCALIZE 0.40 20 XML-INTL 0.40 Total 9.00 Schedule of relevant milestones Milestone number



Comments

M02.1 Workshop event 1 M5 M02.2 F2F meeting 1 M3



Estimated indicative person months


Delivery date

D02.1 First Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

1 0.20 R PU 6

D02.2 First F2F Reports (Minuted recommendations)

1 0.20 R PU 6

Total 0.40


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62



Work package Number

WP03

Work package title Authoring the multilingual Web Project Start month 7 End month 12 Lead beneficiary number

1

Objectives Workshop participants share their experiences with standards, guidelines, best practices and initiatives related to authoring content for the Web, and discuss areas needing attention. Produce a set of recommendations for work that is not being adequately addressed, with prioritization. Continued work on the internationalization checker and training course development. Put in place a mechanism for partners to provide results for tests in W3C internationalization test suite, and begin to incorporate the first results.

Description of work and role of partners Task 3.1: Workshop [Task leader & host: Partner CNR-ILC] The main component of this work package is a 2-day workshop with the theme “Authoring the multilingual Web”. During the workshop, partners and any other participants (the latter subject to acceptance of position papers) will share their experiences with standards, guidelines, best practices and initiatives related to authoring content for the Web, and discuss areas needing attention. There will also be the opportunity for a small number of selected subject matter experts to present short educational sessions relating to practical techniques for authors (eg. latest developments in language tagging, character and language declarations in HTML5, current status of IDNA, issues with content management systems and authoring tools, etc.) The workshop should include authoring of corporate content using content management systems and organization websites, but also personal authoring in such things as blogs and social networking environments. Topics can include authoring practices related to automated checking of character encoding, language and other declarations, CSS styling features, translatability issues, navigating around multilingual sites, use of language tagging, IDNA, authoring for mobile devices, etc. This workshop will be open to the public. The minutes and a summary report of the findings of the workshop will be made publicly available on the project Web site. All position papers and


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

slides presented will also be available. In particular, any presentations from subject matter experts sharing practical best practices will be made available on or linked to from the W3C site. Unlike the first workshop, this workshop will be organized more along the lines of a round-table, where the main objective is for participants to discuss topics together with a view to uncovering and listing issues and opportunities for future work. Consequently, this workshop will be smaller than the first workshop. The workshop will be announced widely, using most of the means described for WP2, but the role of partners in identifying and inviting specific attendees will be particularly important, as those thus targeted will probably constitute the majority of attendees besides the partners themselves. The aim will be to restrict the size of the workshop to around 40 participants – many more than this will make discussions unmanageable. Targeted attendees will be discussed by the partners during program committee teleconferences. Other applicants will be admitted to the workshop only if the program committee agrees, based on their position paper submission. For more details, see the forthcoming communication and mobilisation plan. Task 3.2: Dissemination [Task leader: W3C] The coordinator will produce and announce minutes of the workshop and a summary of the standards and best practices discussed, and recommendations for new work in this area. These documents will be hosted on the project Web site. Task 3.3: Practical work items [Task leader: W3C] The coordinator will continue implementing the internationalization checker and training materials, taking into account the discussions during the face-to-face meeting in WP2, and produce versions that can be reviewed during the next work package. Description of WP Deliverables D03.1) Second Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings): The deliverable will analyse the attendance and presentations, reproduce the minutes and the recommendations. In addition, a list of the documentation related to the organisation of the event will be provided with this document. The minutes, recommendations and presentation slides will be made available from the web site. The document will be prepared by the AFC and the NCO. [month 12] D03.2) Practical work items: Report on First implementation of internationalization checker : This report will summarise progress on the internationalization checker and training materials to date to provide input to the face-to-face meeting planned for WP4. The document will be prepared by the NCO. [month 12]


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62


participant


LIMERICK 0.40

18 VEVP 0.40 19 WELOCALIZE 0.40 20 XML-INTL 0.40 Total 8.90




Comments

M03.1 Workshop event 1 M11



Estimated indicative personmonths


Delivery date

D03.1 Second Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

1 0.20 R PU 12

D03.2 Practical work items: Report on First implementation of internationalization checker

1 0.50 R PU 12

Total 0.70


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62



Work package Number

WP04

Work package title Translation tool support Start month 13 End month 18 Lead beneficiary number

1

Objectives During the workshop, partners and any other participants (the latter subject to acceptance of position papers) will share their experiences with standards, best practices and techniques related to enabling efficient and effective translation of Web based content, and discuss areas needing attention. Partners will review work on the practical items and input further suggestions for their development. The coordinator will produce a new version of the internationalization checker and the training materials.

Description of work and role of partners Task 4.1: Workshop [Task leader & host: Partner UO (ILTO)] The main component of this work package is a 2-day workshop with the theme “Translation tool support”. Relevant topics will include the W3C's Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) specification, standards supporting internationalized content creation, XLIFF, TMX, and other standards supporting management of translation information, translation technologies and language tools, and so on. Unlike the first workshop, this workshop will be organized more along the lines of a round-table, where the main objective is for participants to discuss topics together with a view to uncovering and listing issues and opportunities for future work. Consequently, this workshop will be smaller than the first workshop. .Partners will play a key role in inviting attendees for this workshop. The remarks about this in the description of WP3 also apply here. This workshop will be open to the public. The minutes and a summary report of the findings of the workshop will be made publicly available on the project Web web site. All position papers and slides presented will also be available. In particular, any presentations from subject matter experts sharing practical best practices will be made available on or linked to from the project Web site. During this workshop, the group will also need to take a firm decision on the theme for the 4th and final workshop. Task 4.2: Dissemination [Task leader: W3C] The coordinator will produce and announce minutes of the workshop and a summary of the standards and best practices discussed, and recommendations for new work in this area. These documents will be hosted on the project Web site.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Task 4.3: Practical work items [Task leader: W3C. Host UL LRC.] Partners will meet face-to-face to review the internationalization checker and the proposed curriculum. The coordinator will then produce a second version of the internationalization checker and training materials, taking into account the discussions during the face-to-face meeting. Partners supplying results for the internationalization test suite will continue to do so as new tests are written or new user agent versions are introduced. Description of WP Deliverables

D04.1) Third Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings): The deliverable will analyse the attendance and presentations, reproduce the minutes and the recommendations. In addition, a list of the documentation related to the organisation of the event will be provided with this document. The minutes, recommendations and presentation slides will be made available from the web site. The document will be prepared by the AFC and the NCO. [month 18] D04.2) Second F2F Reports (Minuted recommendations): The deliverable will analyse the attendance,reproduce the minutes and summarise discussions. It will clearly list the input received from the participants. The document will be prepared by the NCO assisted by the AFC. [month 18]


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62


participant


LIMERICK 0.50





Comments

M04.1 Workshop event 1 M17 M04.2 F2F meeting 1 M14





Delivery date

D04.1 Third Workshop Conference (program, minutes and key findings)

1 0.20 R PU 18

D04.2 Second F2F Reports (Minuted recommendations)

1 0.20 R PU 15

Total 0.40


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62



Work package Number

WP05

Work package title Final Workshop Start month 19 End month 24 Lead beneficiary number

1

Objectives Workshop participants share their experiences with standards, guidelines, best practices and initiatives related to another specific topic, to be decided during the project, and discuss areas needing attention. Produce a set of recommendations for further standards and best practices that are not being adequately addressed, with prioritization.

Description of work and role of partners Task 5.1: Workshop [Task leader: Partner W3C. Host EC DGT Luxembourg] The main component of this work package is a 2-day workshop with a theme that will be decided by participants of previous workshops. The current plan is to divide the workshop into two parts. One part will involve small group discussion on a topic to be decided during the project, as per WP3 and WP4. The other part of the workshop will be open to a larger audience, in the same way as the workshop in WP2, and will aim to disseminate information about the findings of the project. During the discussion-oriented part of the workshop, partners and any other participants (the latter subject to acceptance of position papers) will share their experiences with standards, best practices and techniques related to the chosen theme, and discuss areas needing attention. It may be used to extend discussions started in earlier workshops, to provide some continuity and follow-on for those ideas, or one or more new topics may be introduced. Examples could include such things as the following, or other ideas agreed upon by the partners between the first and third workshops: 1. Navigating localized sites, content negotiation and other approaches to delivering to the user the content that they need. 2. Meeting the needs of minority languages. Could be held in conjunction with the Digital World project, looking at minority languages in Europe, but also how Europe should apply it's experience and knowledge to support cultures trying to introduce the Web outside Europe. 3. Review and feedback on standards and specifications currently in development.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

4. Experience sharing about barriers and lessons in handling deployment of multilingual information 5. Wrap up for the project and discussion of ways to continue the work after the end of the project This workshop will be open to the public. The minutes and a summary report of the findings of the workshop will be made publicly available on the project Web site. All position papers and slides presented will also be available. In particular, any presentations from subject matter experts sharing practical best practices will be made available on or linked to from the project Web site. For information about plans to attract audiences for the workshop, see the notes in the previous WP descriptions. Task 5.2: Dissemination [Task leader: W3C] The coordinator will produce and announce minutes of the workshop and a summary of the standards and best practices discussed, and recommendations for new work in this area. These documents will be hosted on the project Web site. Description of WP Deliverables

D05.1) Final Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings): The deliverable will analyse the attendance and presentations, reproduce the minutes and the recommendations. In addition, a list of the documentation related to the organisation of the event will be provided with this document. The minutes, recommendations and presentation slides will be made available from the web site. The document will be prepared by the AFC and the NCO. [month 24]


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62


participant


LIMERICK 0.20





Comments

M05.1 Workshop event 1 M23





Delivery date

D05.1 Final Workshop conference (program, minutes and key findings)

1 0.20 R PU 24

Total 0.20


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

WT4 –List of Milestones n/a Milestones are points where major results have successfully been achieved as the basis for the next phase of work, or are control points at which decisions are needed; for example a milestone may occur when a major result has been achieved, if its successful attainment is a pre-requisite for the next phase of work. Another example would be a point when a choice between several technologies will be made as the basis for the next phase of the project. List of milestones Milestone number Milestone name WP numbers Lead beneficiary

number Delivery date from Annex I 1

Comments

M01.1 Advance payment N°1, N°2, final 1 M1, 14, 27 M01.2 Website set-up, communications

and collaborative tools available 1 M2

M01.3 Project reviews 1 M13, 25 M02.1 Workshop event 1 M5 M02.2 F2F meeting 1 M3 M03.1 Workshop event 1 M11 M04.1 Workshop event 1 M17 M04.2 F2F meeting 1 M14 M05.1 Workshop event 1 M23

WT5: List of Tentative Reviews Reviews should ideally be synchronised with ends of project reporting periods – which may coincide with the major milestones of the project. A tentative planning has to be indicated using the following template table: Tentative schedule of project reviews

Review number Tentative timing

Planned venue of review Comments, if any

RV 1 After month 12 European Commission, Luxembourg

RV 2 After month 24 European Commission, Luxembourg

1 Month in which the milestone will be achieved. Month 1 marking the start date of the project, and all delivery dates being relative to this start date. 2 Month after which the review will take place. Month 1 marking the start date of the project, and all dates being relative to this start date.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

WT6: Summary effort table This table indicates the number of person months over the whole duration of the planned work, for each work package (WP) by each participant. Project effort by beneficiary per work package

Beneficiary short-name

WP1 WP2 WP3 WP4 WP5 Total per Beneficiary

01 ERCIM (W3C)

5,5 1,2 1,2 1,2 0,9 10

02 Bioloom 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 03 CNR 0,4 0,5 0,4 0,2 1,5 04 Facebook 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 05 UAS

Potsdam 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4

06 IJS 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 07 ICIA 0,5 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,5 08 LTC 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 09 Lionbridge 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 10 Microsoft 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 11 Opera 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 12 SAP 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 13 TAUS 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 14 AALTO 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 15 UO 0,4 0,4 0,5 0,2 1,5 16 UPM 0,5 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,5 17 LRC 0,4 0,4 0,5 0,2 1,5 18 VEVP 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 19 welocalize 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4 20 XML-INTL 0,4 0,4 0,4 0,2 1,4

Total 5,5 9 8,9 9 4,7 37,1


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

B3.3. Project management The project management is designed to support the implementation of the network’s work plan and the completion of its contractual obligations vis-à-vis the European Commission, in compliance with the ICT-PSP detailed rules and procedures. To this end, the MultilingualWeb Network will rely on a simple efficient management structure, described in the figure hereafter.

It is composed of the following organs: • General Assembly (GA); • Project Coordination Team composed of the Administrative & Financial Coordinator (AFC) and

the Network coordinator (NCO). The composition, objectives, tasks, and resources of these bodies are detailed hereafter: General Assembly (GA) The General Assembly is the Network contractual decision-making board, chaired by the NCO. Every beneficiary shall be entitled to send one voting representative to the General Assembly and its decisions are legally binding to all partners. The General Assembly will meet at least once a year, during the 2nd and 4th Workshops, and if needed, electronic vote will be organised to address particular issues when they arise. The General Assembly is responsible with regards to the Network contractual obligations:

(i) All contractual changes related to the Beneficiary of the project and to the Consortium Agreement signed in parallel of the Grant Agreement;

(ii) Distribution and management of the EC grant; (iii) Validation of the annual work performed by the partners and implementation of

corrective actions if required;

And will also be sought to: (iv) Assist in the evaluation and validation of the progress of the work packages, approve

all official deliverables and propose corrective actions in case of problems; (v) Will act as a joint organisational committee to define the workshop agenda, the

targeted attendance, to optimise fallouts of each event, and to validate the workshop reports and recommendations.

MultilingualWeb General Assembly

One representative from every beneficiary Chaired by the NCO

EC liaisons

Project Coordination Team

Workpackages 2 to 5

Administrative and Financial Coordinator (AFC)

Network coordinator (NCO)


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

All decisions will be taken seeking consensus. If required, decisions shall be taken by a majority of two thirds of the General Assembly Members present. Administrative and Financial Coordinator (AFC) ERCIM will ensure the administrative and financial coordination of the network and will be to official contact point for the network vis-à-vis the European Commission. Mrs Céline Bitoune will be the ERCIM representative appointed as AFC. Its detailed roles and responsibilities are described in work package 1. The AFC will be responsible for ensuring that the project is carried out efficiently and in accordance with the contractual obligations agreed with the European Commission. Internally, the AFC shall report and be accountable to the General Assembly. In addition, she will provide regular assistance and support to the network coordination (deliverable process, templates, liaisons with partners related to the organisation of the different workshops, etc…).

Network coordinator (NCO) The (NCO) has the responsibility of ensuring the overall coordination of the project, in line with the strategic decisions of the General Assembly. The NCO will monitor work at project level and liaise with related projects and initiatives. In addition, the NCO will establish links inside this community and supervise the work packages accordingly. As such, he is also responsible for the successful organisation of the different workshops, define the workshop agenda, the targeted attendance and for the validation of the workshop reports and recommendations. He will drive the different work packages towards their objectives and also sign off the deliverables produced. The NCO will provide a project home page hosted by W3C for coordinating work and to point to workshop and face to face outputs, ongoing status of work, etc. and set up a communication environment dedicated to the project to support collaborative activities, (WIKI, mailing lists). Communication Tools As Network Coordinator, the W3C will provide world-class tools to support collaborative work, including, for example, IRC channels with command-bots for meeting management, minute-taking, etc, that can be used for face-to-face and teleconference meetings. The W3C also provides support for management of publicly-archived mailing lists, wikis and other collaborative tools as part of its normal business. Risks Analysis Considering the specific objectives of this Network whose success will rely on the regular attendance at the Workshops and F2F meeting, a section has been dedicated to list the potential risks classifying them according three criteria: provenance, probability and impact level. Conflict Resolution As a reminder, the AFC is responsible for ensuring that the project is properly carried out and that the agreements are fulfilled (both those stated in the Consortium Agreement and in the EC rules and guidelines). Effective conflict resolution within the project begins with an understanding that partners report to the Network coordinator, who in turn reports to the AFC. Should the conflict remains, the situation should be reported to the General Assembly to solve the issue through a vote of the Partners’ representative. Dissemination All partners agree that dissemination materials, deliverables and other foreground produced by the Project will be made available under an attribution, non-commercial, share-alike creative commons license. The non-funded partners will have to sign a form when participating, which is intended to provide a similar license.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

Consortium Agreement (CA) and IPR A Consortium Agreement will be signed by all Beneficiaries before the entry into force of the grant agreement between ERCIM and the European Commission. It will state the management rules (rules of participation and funding distribution) and mechanisms of the project (role and responsibilities of the General Assembly). With regard to the IPR issues, the Consortium will identify if exclusion of background is required by partners and include in the CA the provisions for protecting Pre-Existing Know-How. However, considering the type of instrument and the objectives of the project, the results and outcomes should be reported in the public domain.

B3.4. Dissemination / Use of results We are currently envisaging the creation of a Joomla-based web site on the ERCIM server. This would allow partners to submit news items (rather like blog pages), or perhaps other types of information, directly to the site using a username+password and a blog-like content submission form. The W3C has some experience in Joomla-based sites for other EC projects (for example, http://www.primelife.eu/, http://gridcomp.ercim.org/, http://www.vph-noe.eu/, and http://net-wms.ercim.org/

We have already acquired the multilingualweb.eu domain name for this site. The advantage of that will be that if one of the partners or someone else would like to continue to manage the site after the end of the funded project, we can easily transfer the data and the domain name to that organization, who would then run it from their own servers - all this with no disruption to users.

The current expectation is that one of the main components of the site home page would be a news stream, where we add information about the project, announce workshops and workshop outputs, but also mention external developments that are related to multilingual web standards. We expect to be able to also aggregate into the same stream useful blog posts from other people/organisations, and a twitter stream dedicated to the project. (We have already acquired the twitter id multilingweb for this purpose - multilingualweb was not available, but is also getting a little long for a twitter id).

All this information would then be available to anyone via RSS feeds. This would mean that someone could follow the news in their RSS feed aggregator (eg. Bloglines, Outlook, etc), and we could also aggregate the information in things like Planet I18n Web (http://www.w3.org/International/planet/) and a Facebook page, which would further widen our ability to reach people with news.

Of course, the home page would also point to other useful resources. We can also, using relevant keywords, point to search streams for twitter, google and bloglines, and some delicious tags, as we do currently on the i18n web planet page (top right).

Setting up a Facebook page to aggregate information, such as the news items from the home page, photos of meetings from flickr, etc, would enable people to bring the information into their own Facebook streams. Facebook is one of our partners, and will assist in the setup of this page.

The practical deliverables developed in parallel to the project will be publicly available, and pointed to from a variety of places, including key W3C pages.

The workshops themselves will provide a means for dissemination of results among subject experts and the general public. The workshop results will be publicly available on the Web, and announced in a number of places, including key pages on the W3C site.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

B3.5. Resources to be committed In accordance with the specific funding mechanisms for Thematic Networks, the MultilingualWeb initiative will be granted a lump sum for partners and through flat rates based on scale-of-unit costs for the Network coordination. The total funding amounts to 414K Euros for the full project duration for 20 Beneficiaries. This grant aims to cover both the implementation of the Network and the attendance of Network meetings. Contractual Members will perceive a fixed grant of 16K euro for two years (8K euro annually composed of 5K euro for travel and 3K euro related to the work plan implementation costs). The overall European Commission grant is broken down as follows:

Full DurationFlat rate (based on

scale of unit cost) for Coordination costs

Lump sum for implementation costs

Lump sum for attendance of meetings

costs

Coordinator (Partner 1) 1 6000 10000Partner 2-10 9 54000 54000 90000

Partner 11-20 10 40000 60000 100000

TOTAL NETWORK GRANT 414000 The Coordination budget is a flat rate based on scale-of-unit costs composed of 3000€ per year per beneficiary for the first 10 beneficiaries and 2000€ per year per beneficiary from beneficiary 11th to 20th. The detailed budget breakdown per activity can be presented as follows:

Apportionment of Network Funding

4% 3%

18%

75%

Coordination costs

Dissemination

SCO Netw orking activities

all partners Netw orking activities

The above chart shows that 96% of the EC grant will serve the main activities of the Network (implementation of the Network and the attendance of Network meetings) and dissemination (Workshop announcement and material). It includes in particular the costs related to the logistical organisation of the Workshop (rental room, facilities, catering, attendees’ materials...) and the Support team efforts. The management costs represent only 4% of the total funding, and are linked to the contractual obligations of the Network agreed with the European Commission. Additional Resources The funding of this type of instruments is made on the basis of lump sums and flat-rates (based on scale of-unit costs rather than a reimbursement of actual eligible costs. As a consequence the real estimate real costs planned to be incurred by the Beneficiaries and related to their real efforts, are expected to reach roughly two times this grant (taking into account real salaries of person-months and real overhead). In order words, the primary source of funding is the partner’s own resource.


Version 3 (26/10/2009) of 62

On the other hand ERCIM/W3C will make a significant contribution of resources for the development of the practical work items: the internationalization checker, the training curriculum, and the compilation of test results are all activities that fall outside the funding for the Thematic Network. Hereafter are listed the other own resources which will be brought to the project:

Participant No. Participant short name own resource

1 ERCIM (W3C)• Intra-project communication tools (mailing list, shared

workspace • Audio conferencing facilities

7 LTC web based multilingual business and linguistic process automation

annex i - “description of work”...part a of annex i – project summary and budget breakdown...

Documents