In Helsinki, Finland, on June 11, during the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) Annual Conference 2010, it was my honor to participate in the announcement of the official launch of multilingual WorldWideScience.org. This new, global resource is the result of collaboration between Microsoft Research and WorldWideScience.org, an international alliance of national science and technology agencies and libraries representing 65 countries. The operating agent for WorldWideScience.org is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. WorldWideScience.org uses Microsoft Translator technology developed by Microsoft Research and pairs it with federated searching technology from Deep Web Technologies.
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Photo source: Jakke Nikkarinen/STT Info Kuva. From left: Walter Warnick, U.S. Department of Energy (Office of Science); Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Director; Yuri Arskiy, All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), Director; Tony Hey, Microsoft External Research, Corporate Vice President; Richard Boulderstone, British Library, Director of e-Strategy; and Wu Yishan, Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), Chief Engineer
I am excited because multilingual WorldWideScience.org provides unparalleled access to science across what were previously language barriers, enabling real-time searching and translation of multilingual scientific literature. Thanks to Microsoft Research’s translation technology, the website can simultaneously search and translate more than 400 million pages of scientific research published in 70 countries around the world, 96.5 percent of which is not available via any other search engine. Initially, multilingual WorldWideScience.org enables users to search non-English databases and content in China, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, and several Latin American countries. Multilingual WorldWideScience.org translates search results into the user’s language of choice for native speakers of Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. More languages will be added in coming months.
Developing technology that ensures that large volumes of translations are available quickly in a breadth of languages is an ongoing priority at Microsoft Research. Translation technology plays an important role in our work to foster open communication and collaboration among researchers. Bringing these goals together in our collaboration with WorldWideScience.org has been especially fulfilling. Together, we are helping to make the world’s scientific and technical information easily accessible to researchers, students, and governments across the globe.
The launch of multilingual WorldWideScience.org adds yet another resource that we all can leverage in support of collaborative relationships. Those relationships, in turn, expedite our ability to drive research that has the power to improve lives around the world. All of us at Microsoft Research look forward to more meaningful contributions to multilingual WorldWideScience.org to make the world’s scientific and technical information globally accessible. It has been an honor to be involved in this groundbreaking project.
I invite you to visit the new, improved website and give it a try. I think you will be impressed.
Tony Hey, corporate vice president, Microsoft External Research