The paper reports on the development methodology of a system aimed at multi-domain multi-lingual recognition and classification of names in texts, the focus being on the linguistic resources used for training and testing purposes. The corpus presented here has been collected and annotated in the framework of different projects the critical issue being the development of a final resource that is homogenous, re-usable and adaptable to different domains and languages with a view to robust multi-domain and multi-lingual NERC.