Introduction

Some of the current major initiatives in the area of language resources - FLaReNet (http://www.flarenet.eu/), Language Grid (http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html) and META-SHARE (www.meta-share.org, www.meta-net.eu) - have agreed to organise a joint workshop on infrastructural issues that are critical in the age of data sharing and open data, to discuss the state of the art, international cooperation, future strategies and priorities, as well as the road-map of the area. It is an achievement, and an opportunity for our field, that recently a number of strategic-infrastructural initiatives have started all over the world. It is also a sign that funding agencies recognise the strategic value of our field and the importance of helping a coherent growth also through a number of coordinated actions. Some of these initiatives, two European and one Asian, have agreed to join forces to foster a debate that may lead to future coordinated actions all over the world. o