European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) was a series of integrated programmes of information technology research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initiative managed by the Directorate General for Industry (DG III) of the European Commission. Five ESPRIT programmes (ESPRIT 0 to ESPRIT 4) ran consecutively from 1983 to 1998. ESPRIT 4 was succeeded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme in 1999.
Some of the projects and products supported by ESPRIT are:
- BBC Domesday Project, a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme, to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
- CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is a software library that aims to provide easy access to efficient and reliable algorithms in computational geometry. While primarily written in C++, Python bindings are also available. The original funding for the project came from the ESPRIT project.
- Open Document Architecture, a free and open international standard document file format maintained by the ITU-T to replace all proprietary document file formats. In 1985 ESPRIT financed a pilot implementation of the ODA concept, involving, among others, Bull corporation, Olivetti, ICL and Siemens AG.
- RAISE, Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering, was developed as part of the European ESPRIT II LaCoS project in the 1990s, led by Dines Bjørner.
- REMORA methodology is an event-driven approach for designing information systems, developed by Colette Rolland. This methodology integrates behavioral and temporal aspects with concepts for modelling the structural aspects of an information system. In the ESPRIT I project TODOS, which has led to the development of an integrated environment for the design of office information systems (OISs),
- SAMPA: The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script originally developed in the late 1980s.
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