Twente-One: cross language disclosure and retrieval of multimedia documents on sustainable development

The Twenty-One project brings together environmental organisations, technology providers and research institutes from several European countries. The main objective of the project is to make documents on environmental issues—in particular, on the subject of sustainable development—available on CD-ROM and on the Internet. At present, these documents exist on different media (paper, electronic documents, audio-visual material), in different formats (HTML, word processor) and in different languages. This diversity impedes the distribution of documents through normal channels, and makes it hard to search for and retrieve targeted material on specified subjects. The project is developing search engines that can locate required information, and uses automatic translation tools to make foreign-language texts available. Authors and editors gain economic advantages by the increased distribution of their documents, and users find documents more readily available and easily accessible.