Acknowledgements

The AQUALEX glossary has come a long way since it saw the light of day in 1990 as a small collection of aquaculture terminology produced by the Mariculture Committee of the International Council of the Sea (ICES), led by Professor Harald Rosenthal, then of the Institute of Meereskunde, University of Kiel. In those far-off days, some of the glossary items still existed in two, or even three, versions.

It was not until 1992 that the venture really took, when the LINGUA Programme funded a proposal to create a new aquaculture glossary in four languages published both in print format and as a multi-media tool. The project was coordinated by the Institute of Marine Biology in Crete, a young, dynamic institute brimming with ideas and enthusiasm, leading experienced teams from the Institut fur Meereskunde, the University of Cork and the University of Montpellier. Their collaboration produced the first AQUALEX glossary in English, French, German and Greek, published in hardback and CD-ROM by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, New York.

The EU LEONARDO DA VINCI Programme and three new partners, the University of Bergen, the University of Barcelona and the University of Insubria updated the glossary and added Spanish, Norwegian and Italian. By now the 7-language glossary had received joint funding from all partners and two EU programmes of more than 1 million euros and was being run by a small non-profit-making company, the AQUALEX Multimedia Consortium Ltd (AMC).

Convinced of its usefulness to both industry and the academic world, AMC has now spent more than two years developing the glossary as an online database in 6 languages. None of this would have been possible without the unstinting hard work of its many collaborators, who can take pride in their contribution to the latest model of AQUALEX.