Parmenides: An Opportunity For ISO TC37 SC4?

Despite the many initiatives in recent years aimed at creating Language Engineering standards, it is often the case that di erent projects use di erent approaches and often de ne their own standards. Even within the same project it often happens that di erent tools will require di erent ways to represent their linguistic data. In a recently started EU project focusing on the integration of Information Extraction and Data Mining techniques, we aim at avoiding the problem of incompatibility among di erent tools by de ning a Common Annotation Scheme internal to the project. However, when the project was started (Sep 2002) we were unaware of the standardization e ort of ISO TC37/SC4, and so we commenced once again trying to de ne our own schema. Fortunately, as this work is still at an early stage (the project will last till 2005) it is still possible to redirect it in a way that it will be compatible with the standardization work of ISO. In this paper we describe the status of the work in the project and explore possible synergies with the work in ISO TC37 SC4. 1 Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Biovista, Athens, Greece; Centre for Research in Information Management, UMIST, Manchester, UK; CNRS, Paris, France; Unilever Research and Development, Vlaardingen, The Netherlands; TIM/ISSCO, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Uni Magdeburg, Germany; Wordmap Ltd., Bath, UK; Neurosoft, Athens, Greece; The Greek Ministry of National Defense, Athens, Greece