Brasília, June 25, 2003 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - Among the themes that will be dealt with by the Minister of Science and Technology, Roberto Amaral, and the director-general of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura, and other Unesco directors, during Amaral's visit to France this week, are public policies to promote digital inclusion, the use of foreign languages, the information society, elimination of hunger, and preparations for the meeting of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific and Technological Knowledge, scheduled for December, in Rio de Janeiro.

Apart from his meeting with Matsuura, Amaral will meet with the Unesco Deputy Director of Science, Walter Erdelen, to discuss a project involving cooperation between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African nations to use national weather satellites to create an environmental data collection system (surveillance of water resources), a project formulated by the National Institute of Space Research (Inpe).

The discussion of two other Unesco programs are also on the agenda: the Preservation of the Digital Patrimony and the Promotion and Use of Multiple Languages and Universal Access. As far as the first of these programs goes, Brazil has a national committee that is preparing recommendations, to be presented at the 32nd Unesco General Conference in September, in Paris. The second proposal counts on the work of the Brazilian Science and Technology Information Institute (Ibict), which is preparing multi-lingual content systems through one of its priority programs, the Brazilian Digital Library (BDB).

The Promotion and Use of Multiple Languages and Universal Access program is intended to add to translation software among the 15 main languages used in the world, among them, Portuguese, which redoubles Brazil's interest in the program, which aims to preserve these languages in the digital field. (DAS)