Overview

CACAO offers an innovative approach for accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual content in digital libraries and library catalogues, enabling European users to better exploit the available European electronic content.

By coupling sound Natural Language Processing techniques with available information retrieval systems and tools for facilitating the maintenance of multilingual resources, we will deliver a non-intrusive infrastructure to be integrated with current library catalogues and digital libraries. As a result, the user will be able to type in queries in his/her own language and retrieve volumes and documents in any available language.

Such an infrastructure will be crucial to promote aggregation of content at the European level. Already during the lifetime of the project, CACAO will promote the aggregation of content, in particular:

the largest European aggregation of digital libraries, i.e. The European Library will adopt the CACAO infrastructure.
The library catalogues of the five partner libraries will be aggregated into a single multilingual access point.
Three thematic portals aggregating several European collections (Mathematics, European History, Geography) will be made available to the public.

Finally, the consortium will launch at month 12 of the CACAO project a start-up with the mission of marketing, selling and maintaining the cross-language access platform.