Limbering up - Preparing for the race to provide multi-lingual access and
automatic indexing

Ken Miller
Head of Information System Development
The Data Archive, University of Essex


                LIMBER (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European 
        Resources) is a European Union, Human Language Technologies funded
        project lead by the Central Laboratory to the Resarch Councils 
        (CLRC) at Rutehrford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). The other partners 
        in the project are The Data Archive at the University of Essex 
        (UKDA), the Norwegian Social Science Data Archive (NSD) and
        Intrasoft. 

        This paper will outline the aims of the project, the technologies,
        architecture and standards to be utilised, the products it will
        deliver and the progress made to date. Its major objectives are to
        aid resource discovery, interoperability and mapping between
        terminologies. Its main deliverables are a) to develop and
        demonstrate a multilingual query and retrieval tool working in
        several languages and using a multilingual thesaurus, with
        keyword and phrase translation and b) to develop and demonstrate
        tools to support the construction and maintenance of databases
        using automatic indexing.