The language service industry and its clients are facing waves upon waves of disruptive trends. The globalisation of markets is rapidly increasing the number of target locales that even SMEs now strive to sell into. The way companies communicate with their customers is shifting rapidly from the traditional push of marketing and customer support documents to an increasingly interactive conversation with communities and individuals, with a steadily increasing velocity of multilingual content. Data driven language technology such as statistical machine translation present major new opportunities for the language services industry but raise new challenges in how to obtain or pool the language resources that drive it.

All of these challenges demand high levels of interoperability, but proprietary format are still commonplace and standardisation efforts remain fragmented, resulting in some companies suffering 20% cost overheads just handling interoperability. Interoperability in the language service industry is also subject to many disruptive trends. While the shift of content to the web offer some homogenisation of content formats (HTML and XML) and meta-data (XML, RDF, microdata), It also portents much richer mixes of static content, multimedia content, web application code and deep-web data that demand new dynamic interoperability solutions for the transaltion, transcription and annotation of interactive, mutlimodal and user generated content with increasing volumes, speed and agility. The web also offers a range of interoperability methods, from functional web service (WSDL, XML) and resource based web services (RESTful) to open data approach (linked data and SPARQL), which increases interoperability options but which may also serve to silo interoperability standards.

This event aims to bring together experts from the language services industry facing these challenges, R&D labs that are exploring new interoperability solutions and the various standards bodies instrumental for making such solution accessible as conformable specifications. it aims to offer a neutral venue where these stakeholder can exchange knowledge and experiences and discuss the future direction in addressing the interoperability challenges facing the industry.