"We aspire to all projects in the Asia IT&C programme, and elsewhere, communicating electronically in the language and following the cultural conventions of their choice, without constraint of technology or substantial cost.

We will supply enabling knowledge and technology to support the overall Asia IT&C programme, and to help the wider communities of Asia benefit from the Information Society revolution. We will enhance access to IT&C technologies through reducing the linguistic and cultural barriers to their use.

This goal will be achieved by bringing together the relevant research and development communities of South Asia and Europe, in order to:

• arrive at a shared perception of the access problems concerning human language and culture,
• transfer knowledge in both directions so that R&D work in Asia and Europe can continue through collaboration between the two communities,
• increase the European IT&C presence in Asia where the IT&C industry at present is dominated by US commercial presence,
• engage further the experts in Asia in the development of key IT&C standards.

While we will focus on South Asia, the knowledge and technology that we gather together and create will be disseminated as widely as possible within Europe and Asia, to the benefit of the wider Asian community.

The project will facilitate increased collaboration in Human Languages Technologies within South Asia, and through that lead to an increased development of and agreement on standards to enable resource sharing. The European experience here within the various research and development Framework programmes is very positive. If the standards agreed upon could be harmonised across South Asia and Europe this would be a very positive outcome."