The UK, through DTI-OST, is participating very actively in the project both at the technical design level and in providing data from UK Research Councils.
Similar situations exist in other European countries.
Following evaluation, it is expected that the full implementation can start under Framework 5. After evaluation it is intended to extend this later to cover experts, institutions, facilities, publications and products - all subject to the principle of subsidiarity. The whole system is based on WWW to ensure minimal cost and maximal ease of use for the end-user. The pilot ERGO project will have one central node only within the catalogue. The idea is to test, input, update and query procedures on a catalogue.