The UNL Initiative: An Overview

We are presenting a description of the UNL initiative based on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). This language was conceived to be the support of the multilingual communication on the Internet beyond the linguistic barriers. This initiative was launched by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University in 1996. The initial consortium was formed to support 15 languages. Eight years later, this initial consortium changed, many components and resources were developed, and the UNL language itself evolved to be the support of different type of applications from the multilingual generation to the “knowledge repositories” or cross lingual information retrieval applications. We describe the main features of the UNL Language making a comparison with some similar approaches like interlinguas. We also describe some organizational and managerial aspects of the UNL according the criteria of quality and maturity, putting emphasis on the open character of the initiative for any interested group or researcher.