United Nations Universal Networking Language (UNL)

["Martin Bryan" <mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com>]

At the Internationalization meeting at the WWW9 meeting in Amsterdam today (Thursday) a speaker linked to the United Nations University in Tokyo presented the role of the Universal Networking Language (UNL). He described this language as being targetted as providing universal semantics for small businesses. However, he was unable to explain the relationship between this and EDIFACT, ISO BSR or any other well known business groups. Is anyone in our group aware of this initiative, or have any knowledge of how their semantics link to those used for trading? (See http://www.unl.ias.unu.edu/ for more details - but I have yet to get time to look at this myself.)

Martin Bryan