Short for European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, it is the European host of the W3C, an international consortium of companies involved with the Internet and the Web. ERCIM was founded in 1989 by INRIA, GMD (now merged with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany), and CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, The Netherlands), to build a European not-for-profit consortium dedicated to the advancement of information technology and applied mathematics.