The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, or CLEF, is an organization promoting research in multilingual information access

Information access

Information access is a term used to describe an area of research at the intersection of informatics, Information Science, Information Security, Language Technology, Computer Science, and library science....

 (currently focusing on European languages). Its specific functions are to maintain an underlying framework for testing information retrieval

Information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

 systems, and creating repositories

Digital library

A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...

 of data for researchers to use in developing comparable standards.
The organization holds a forum meeting every September in Europe. Prior to each forum, participants receive a set of challenge tasks. The tasks are designed to test various aspects of information retrieval systems and encourage their development. Groups of researchers propose and organize campaigns to satisfy those tasks. The results are used as benchmarks

Benchmark (computing)

In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it...

for the state of the art in the specific areas. ,

For example, the 2010 medical retrieval tasks focuses on retrival of computed tomography, MRI, and radiographic images.