Thierry Declerck was representing the Prêt-à-LLOD project at the Kick-Off Meeting of the newly launched European Language Grid (ELG) project (https://www.european-language-grid.eu/). This event took place on January 22/23, 2019. The aim of the ELG project is "to develop the first – and primary – platform for European Language Technologies, which, in the medium to long term, is meant to turn into the most important digital marketplace for language technology solutions in Europe."
The Prêt-à-LLOD community-building activities need to be closely associated with the goals of the ELG project, as the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) development should be embedded in an overall strategy for promoting natural language resources and technologies across European countries and beyond, and ELG is a first place for achieving this. Ensuring a close collaboration with ELG helps also to establish cooperation mechanisms with the other projects that are funded in the context of the ICT-29-2018 action "A multilingual Next Generation Internet", and so to identify and reinforce synergies among different players, new opportunities and businesses, channel common efforts, enable the integration and widespread adoption of different multilingual solutions and, consequently, contribute to increase the number of potential users of the LLOD ecosystem. Besides joining forces with ELG on community building activities, Prêt-à-LLOD will contribute with a number of linked-data-aware NLP services to be integrated into the ELG infrastructure. Parallel to this, the linked data technologies used and further developed in Prêt-à-LLOD for the description and management of metadata will be extended in order to contribute to an easy sharing and discovery of resources of current metadata repositories for linguistic data, providing a data search tool covering major dataset sources (EUDAT, Datahub) and language resource repositories (ELRA, LDC, Metashare, CLARIN, ELG), allowing a faster and better access to resources. Regular telcos have been agreed for sustaining the cooperation between ELG and the six projects funded in the RIA part of the above mentioned ICT-29-2018 action "A multilingual Next Generation Internet". The six projects are Prêt-à-LLOD (http://www.pret-a-llod.eu/), ELITR (https://elitr.eu/), EMBEDDIA (http://embeddia.eu/), Bergamot (https://browser.mt/), COMPRISE (https://project.inria.fr/comprise/) and GoURMET (https://gourmet-project.eu/).