One of the main objectives of a truly user-friendly Information Society is to focus on advanced human language technologies enabling cost-effective interchange across language and culture and more natural interfaces to digital services. Europe is made up from nationalities with a broad variety of cultures and languages. So, the information society must develop in such a way as to support and nurture these rich diversities, rather than act as a constraint to their evolution through the new media.

The project demonstrates the mediation system with two trials, namely sale of train travels with hotel and other bookings, and B-to-C mail-order sale of clothes and accessories. Figure 1 illustrates the system architecture, which is implemented as Java EJBs. The technical approach is highly based on combined use of human language processing and ontologies. This combination plays a central role in i) mapping the human language query onto an ontological representation; ii) producing composite services from CP catalogues by the broker; iii) mapping ontological queries onto the ontological representations of the catalogues, and iv) describing the domain knowledge. They are used for classifying and indexing catalogues, for facilitating multilingual man-machine dialogues and for inferring information that is relevant to the user’s request.