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== Scope and goals ==
The UNL is an effortdesigned to achieveestablish a simple basisfoundation for representing the most central aspects of information and meaning in a machine- and human-language-independent form. As a language-independent formalism, the UNL aims atto codingcode, storingstore, disseminatingdisseminate and retrievingretrieve information independently of the original language in which it was expressed. In this sense, UNL seeks to provide the tools for overcoming the language barrier in a systematic way.
At first glance, the UNL seems to be a multilingual machine translation system, i.e., a kind of Interlinguainterlingua, tointo which the source texts are converted before being translated into the target languages. It can, in fact, be used for such athis purpose, and very efficiently too. However, its real strength is toknowledge represent knowledgerepresentation and its primary objective is to serve asprovide an infrastructure for handling knowledge that already exists or can exist in any given language.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that at this point in timepresent it would be foolish to state it possibleclaim to represent the “full” meaning of any word, sentence, or text for any language. Subtleties of intention and interpretation make the “full meaning”, whatever concepthowever we might have ofconceive it, too variable and subjective for any systematic treatment. TheThus UNL avoids the pitfalls of trying to represent the “full meaning” of sentences or texts, targeting instead the “core” or “consensual” meaning that is most often attributed to them. In this sense, much of the subtlety of poetry, metaphor, figurative language, innuendo, and other complex, indirect communicative behaviors is beyond the current scope and goals of the UNL. Instead, the UNL targets direct communicative behavior and literal meaningsmeaning as a tangible, concrete basis for much or most of human communication in practical, day-to-day settings.
== Structure ==
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