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Acronym and title of the project

Eastin CL
Crosslingual and multimodal search in a portal for support of assisted living

Official Start and End dates

01/02/2010 - 30/04/2012

Funding Body

European commission
ICT Policy Support Programme 2009

Project Leaders and partners

• Linguatec, Munich, Germany (project leader)

• Tilde, Riga, Latvia (partner)

• Danish Centre for Assistive Technology, Denmark (partner)

• IW/Rehadat, Koln, Germany (partner)

• Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus, Milan, Italy (partner)

Project Summary

The project Eastin CL aims to develop a crosslingual and multimodal portal containing information on assistive tools and technology. The portal is developed by DonGnocchi Foundation and IW-REHADAT in order to provide databases on assistive technology on national level; these databases contain more than 100.000 documents. Document languages contained in the portal are German, English, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Dutch and (since June 2009) France.

The project is aimed at supporting the social participation of disabled and elderly people, thanks to a multilingual and multimodal portal providing information on assistive tools and technology. The existing EASTIN portal will be extended through a full crosslingual search, both for professional and non-professional users. The cross lingual and cross modal extensions provided by this project are expected to significantly increase usage and partecipation in this European network.

Users can search for assistive technology using the portal; the search is guided by a domain ontology which is ISO certified (cf. ISO 9999: 'Assistive products for persons with disability'). The databases contain several ten thousand of products, reports, and other information relevant for the domain. Moreover, the ISO ontology has been translated into many languages.

From a technological point of view, there are two major innovations:

• transparent search: users can search the database in their native language, and receive the search results in their native language as well. They will not notice that the documents are stored in a different language;

• multimodal access: searching the database using the speech channel is only slowly emerging, and has not found its way into larger applications yet .

As far as application is concerned, currently users can access the portal only by typing, and in their native language only if there are documents in their language, otherwise they can access it in English. EASTIN-CL will allow them to access the data even if the document language differs from the query language, and will provide multimodal interaction options.

Related web sites

• http://www.eastin.eu/

• http://www.eastin-cl.eu/

Team involved at DonGnocchi Foundation

• Renzo Andrich, Polo Tecnologico (responsabile)

• Valerio Gower, Polo Tecnologico

• Andrea Agnoletto, Polo Tecnologico

• Antonio Caracciolo, Dat Service Centro IRCSS Centro S.Maria Nascente

• Matteo Serratoni, Polo Tecnologico

Documents publicly available