The popularity of Internet and the consequent global availability of networked information sources and digital libraries has led to a strong demand for multilingual access and communication technologies. However, despite recent research advances, there are still very few operational systems in existence, and these are limited to the most widely used languages. The challenge that must now be faced is how to best transfer the research results to the wider market place.

TrebleCLEF supports the development and consolidation of expertise in the multidisciplinary research area of multilingual information access (MLIA) and disseminates this knowhow to the application communities through a set of complementary activities, with the following objectives:

• To promote high standards of evaluation in MLIA systems using three approaches: test collections; user evaluation; and log file analysis
• To sustain a MLIA evaluation community by organizing annual evaluation campaigns and providing high quality access to past evaluation results
• To disseminate knowhow, tools, resources and best practice guidelines, enabling system developers to make content and knowledge accessible, usable and exploitable over time, over media and over language boundaries.