Opportunities for Cooperation between Estonia and ... - Valitsus

technology is required. In addition to scientists engaged in high-level research
and development, a wide range of qualified IT professionals are needed in
various spheres of daily life.
At the same time as new electronic services are developed, it is also imperative
to enhance the user-friendliness of existing e-services. Considering the scope
of and prospects for electronic services, access to computers and the Internet
by old people and the handicapped should also be improved. It is appropriate,
therefore, to organize comprehensive and customized training for individual
user groups.
The governments of Estonia and Finland could field a proposal for establishing
an inter-Baltic and inter-Nordic information and communications technology
institute of education. It would be a polytechnic or university of applied sciences
with a syllabus determined jointly by the participating countries. The individual
study modules would be implemented in the countries with the best resources
for this purpose. The participating country would finance the operation of the
foreseen polytechnic in proportion to the reserved student quota.
In an open information society, the availability of electronic services in the
mother tongue is vital to linguistic and cultural identity. This pins high hopes
on the development of a range of language technology applications.
A more intense cooperation in the context of Estonia’s and Finland’s national
language technology programmes would promote the implementation and
development of user-friendly basic applications in Estonian and Finnish. In a
globalized world, a native-language information society will give an edge, and
by investing in its development we will encourage the creation of applications
important to users, thereby contributing to international scientific research.
In the context of the inter-country cooperation related to language technology
software, it would be important to increase the number of joint projects being
carried out by the current partners, namely the University of Helsinki, Tallinn
University of Technology and the University of Tartu. Hopefully, these projects
will, in a space of five years, produce tools for a morphological analysis
of Estonian and Finnish as well as machine translation technologies and
synthesized speech applications.
Recommendations:
• A joint Estonian-Finnish information society council and a working group
working under its auspices should be established to issue recommendations
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