Wikipedia
Quaero ( Latin for I seek) was a European research and development program with the goal of developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications (such as search engines). The European Commission approved the aid granted by France on 11 March 2008.
This program was supported by the OSEO. It was a French project with the participation of several German partners. The consortium was led by Thomson SA. Other companies involved in the consortium were France Télécom, Exalead, , Jouve, , Vecsys, Vocapia Research, LTU Technologies, and Synapse Développement. Many public research institutes were also involved, including National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, Laboratoire d'informatique pour la mécanique et les sciences de l'ingénieur, IRCAM, RWTH Aachen, University of Karlsruhe, Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse, Clips Imag, Groupe des Écoles des Télécommunications, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique; as well as other public organisations such as Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Bibliothèque nationale de France, LIPN, and Direction Générale de l'Armement.
According to the AII press release, the main targeted applications could be divided into three broad classes: multimedia indexing and search tools for professional and general public use, including mobile environments; professional solutions for production, post-production, management and distribution of multimedia documents; and facilitation of access to cultural heritage such as audiovisual archives and digital libraries.