UNL, Challenges and Misunderstandings. Some answers

The UNL, either as language or as a system, is not well known due to several reasons. At this moment, UNL is not only the name of a language for computers aiming at supporting multililingual services in Internet. It is also a system, with a defined architecture and a wide panorama of applications and possibilities to support business, institutional and educational applications, all of them going beyond the linguistic barriers. Nobody doubts about the possibilities of this type of system. However, this system today supported by an organization based on a Foundation (placed in Geneva and created only to support this UN initiative) needs the collaboration and financial help of all kind of sources (UN is not financing the initiative at this moment). This is a hard task. Perhaps the more significant case about the impossibility to reach financial support for this initiative and also about the different research and application issues has been the high number of project proposals made for different Call for Proposals of the EC in the area of E-content and IST, as well. All of them have been rejected, thus creating a wall for the development of the systems of the European languages, that are actually the more advanced within the UNL Consortium. This paper will try to analyze the different evaluations made for the various proposals in order to clear up the real state of this system and also the reasons of the low level of knowledge about this important initiative. Our goal then is to examine the opinions of the EC evaluators giving in the paper the adequate answers to them even by the side of the UNL Consortium too. Dissemination policies and internal organization of the UNL will be clarified for a better analysis in the immediate future. 1. The New Organization for the UNL Program The Universal Networking Language (UNL in the following) arises by the initiative from the Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU/IAS), of the United Nations University in 1996. The mission of the UNL Programme (UNDL, 2002a) is to develop and promote a multilingual communication platform for Internet, with the purpose of enabling all peoples to share information and knowledge in their native language. The IAS first selected a group of institutions from fifteen countries that were in charge of developing the modules for each corresponding language. The milestones and partial results are revised in yearly meetings. In Brussels, 1999 it was presented more than a project. It was presented an Organization for the future. But the most important fact is perhaps that, after three years of development work of the participating teams, the UNL Language specifications were made public. That is, anyone can develop, potentially, for public or commercial use, components and systems integrable with the UNL system. The current organization of the UNL Programme (UNLP) has been put on the hands of the recently created UNDL Foundation (UNDL, 2002b), a non-profit international organization created to continue the research and development initiated by the UNU/IAS in Information Technologies, in particular, in the field of interlingua communication, UNL and its applications in all areas of human knowledge and activities. The UNDL deploys the UNL facilities to assist all peoples in bridging the digital and cultural divide, in accordance with the principles and objectives of the United Nations and its Members States. The new organization of the UNL Programme has a network of persons and institutions under the direction and sponsorship of the UNDL Foundation. The UNLP network consists of the UNL Center, the Language Centers (LC) of each language and other elements as UNL National Units, Permanent Committees and ad-hoc working groups. The UNL Center has the overall responsibility (UNDL, 2002c) for promoting and coordinating the UNLP. In this organizational structure the LC are considered as an expansion of the UNL Center for a given language and is responsible for the research, development and maintenance of the UNL System in that language. For all these tasks, each LC must, as opposed to the past, procure the necessary financial means for the support of the LC and UNLP operations (article VII.4.e, UNLP Statute). In this paper we explain the efforts addressed by European LC, in the last years trying to get funding from the European Commission (EU) Research Programmes. 2. History of the proposals presented European LCs have been involved in the last years in the preparation of a lot of proposals in different EU Programmes including UNL as technological base. All of them failed. We think that there are no only specific reasons to reject every proposal. This total coincidence may can be explained additionally by global reasons related to the perception and knowledge of the UNL technology by the EC evaluators as the political and technical actions of the UNL Organization. Globally speaking, we have collected information of 8 project proposals to the EC programmes with the UNL technology as basis; all of them rejected. However, we are going to focus in this analysis over the last 5 proposals because two reasons: they are the last ones, and we, this research Group as support of the Spanish LC, has had a very active participation in them. The three other proposals were made by consortiums coordinated by companies. In all cases the application of the UNL technology fit very well with the system proposed. These proposals were named HEREIN-ML, and AQUITRA with applications for the International Office of Water. Both proposals were thought for the multilingual support of the European Heritage Project (www.european-heritage.net). Today the European languages are covering part of the multilingual support with the UNL technology with a high degree of precarity and with direct investment in resources from the Spanish government and the Spanish Language Centre, using resources of free collaborators. However in these proposals the UNL was not accepted at all as alternative for the multilingual support. The 5 proposals considered (see table 1), in chronological order, will be described through the summary of goals and the action lines of the Programme in which the proposal has been developed. Date Identifier Programme July 00 QANET 3312 Econtent Preparatory actions October 00 QANET IST200028568 RTD Proposal, IST January 01 LINGWEB 30130 RTD Proposal, IST July 01 EU-UNL: 22045 Econtent Programme. Demonstration Project