The Commission for the Coordination and Regional Development of the North of Portugal (CCDR-N) has been elected as the Managing Authority of the European Territorial Cooperation Programme "Atlantic Area".

This programme, in force between 2007 and 2013, covered the 36 Regions (NUTS II) with Atlantic seaboard, in Portugal, Spain, France, UK and Ireland. This program was the result of the previous Interreg IIIB Atlantic Area.

Under the Collaboration Agreement signed with the CCDR-N, INESC TEC developed a software tool to support the management of this Programme.

This is a multilingual electronic collaborative platform in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English, and its main objectives are:
• Supporting the management activities of the programme, particularly the management structure, Working Groups and Project Teams;
• Supporting the development of Project Ideas, disseminating them and fostering partnerships;
• Supporting the Call for Projects applications, making it possible to receive, evaluate and select the applications, as well as automatically create specific areas for the project, after the signing of the respective contracts;
• Providing institutional information on the programme, disseminating its objectives and activities, including projects approved, notices, seminars, various documents, relevant links, related news, activities and events calendar, statistical information and studies.

This tool is used by users located in the various countries involved in the programme through the Internet, creating a truly distributed and fully multilingual work environment. The structure of the various pages and the contents (if translated) will appear in the language selected automatically by the browser.

Simultaneously, a process of technology transfer was developed which aimed to provide the CCDR-N with autonomy to implement this type of collaborative tools.

The system is available at http://atlanticarea.inescporto.pt/.

The technical team of INESC Porto was led by Paulo Melo of the Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics (CSIG), in collaboration with the Business Informatics Service (SIG).