A new EU-funded project is building multilingual internet programmes that will facilitate the presentation and retrieval of online information across a range of languages. The programmes will meet government, industry and business needs to make full use of the Internet's information dissemination potential.

The collection, presentation and dissemination of information in a globalised world is one of the most important challenges facing society today. Citizens of all countries must be guaranteed access to information across language barriers. The Internet is now probably the world's most important and easily accessible repository of information, but it needs to be better exploited and organised.

In response to these needs, the MONNET project responds to these needs by focusing mainly on public sector applications and business intelligence thanks to the collaboration among several public bodies and other companies that will create multilingual internet programmes.

Launched in March of this year, the MONNET ('Multilingual ontologies for networked knowledge') project has received EUR 2.4 million under the 'Information and communication technologies' Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The Ontology Engineering Group, part of the School of Computing at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain, is coordinating the project which is scheduled to end in 2013.

Easy access to multilingual information on the Web would also be good for developing countries as they could obtain information in their own languages, something which would help boost their involvement in the global market place, and for many international organisations as they have to offer the information they disseminate in a range of languages and also manage information submitted to them in many different languages.

Other project partners working on MONNET alongside the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Ontology Engineering Group are the University of Bielefeld (Germany), the National University of Ireland, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Ireland) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.