The structure of EAGLES has resulted from recommendations made by leading industrial and academic centres, and by the EC's Language Engineering strategy committees.
A very large number of EU research centres, industrial organisations, professional associations and networks across the EU are providing labour, for free, towards the common effort: more than 100 sites are involved in the different EAGLES groups or subgroups of which approximately 40% from industry distributed throughout all the Working Groups. However, it was found that, especially in areas where material had to be gathered, compared and synthesised, where feedback had to be assimilated and integrated, and where major revision of proposals had subsequently to be carried out to achieve wider consensus, the work was both time-consuming and labour-intensive and therefore had to be paid for.
In human terms, there is now a large community available that has learned how to work together towards standardisation objectives, is highly motivated to do so and has good industrial participation in key areas of spoken and written LR.
EAGLES has engendered a broad sense of cooperation, and has offered a forum in which both users and developers can together arrive at workable recommendations in Language Engineering. Users and developers have contacted EAGLES to get early information on guidelines, to offer advice and collaboration.
With financial support from the EC's LRE Programme, coordination is being carried out by the Consorzio Pisa Ricerche (Italy), while five working groups execute the detailed work.