European R&D and standardisation in the multimedia domain: a symbiotic relationship

European R&D programmes in telecommunication and information technology, managed by the European Commission Services, are about to start a new phase. The Information Society Technologies programme brings to the foreground the concept of convergence. Convergence between technologies but also between technology and the commercial and regulatory requirements to enable open global markets. The former industrial pre-competitive European R&D programmes, RACE (Research and Development in Advanced Communications in Europe) and ACTS (Advanced Communications Technologies and Services), maintained a strong symbiotic relationship with standardisation. Through mechanisms put in place during the lifetime of the programme the various research projects were clustered in concertation groups to harmonise approaches leading to clear and stronger contributions in the different standardisation organisation/consortia. The expectations are that standardisation in the networked multimedia domain works as enabler of market openness and fairness, public interest and social-cultural awareness (in the sense of taking into account the end-user as an individual or community) leading to a non-obstructive competitive attitude. This paper lists a non-exhaustive set of points in telecommunication and information technology where we believe R&D and standardisation must find a sustained input/output flow of background technological work and consensus-building mechanisms to achieve the above mentioned objectives.