Multilingual WorldWideScience.org Launch Broadens Access to Global Science
Washington, D.C. - Scientific language barriers were broken today in Helsinki with the launch of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org. While a large share of scientific literature is published in English, vast quantities of high-quality science are not, and the pace of non-English scientific publishing is increasing. WorldWideScience.org will now enable the first-ever real-time searching and translation across globally-dispersed, multilingual scientific literature using complex translations technology.
"In an increasingly interconnected world, resolving the global challenges of science requires rapid communication of scientific knowledge," said Dr. William F. Brinkman, Director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. "Breaking the language barrier through WorldWideScience.org will help erode borders and build research networks across DOE, the nation, and around the globe."
Multilingual WorldWideScience.orgBETA builds on its previous English-only capabilities to allow users to search non-English databases in China, Russia, France, and several Latin American countries and receive search results translated into one of nine languages. This will benefit the English-speaking science community as it enables searching and translation of non-English sources. Conversely, it will benefit native speakers of other major languages (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian) by translating search results into the user's language of choice. More languages will be added in the coming months. This new capability is the result of an international public-private collaboration between the WorldWideScience.org Alliance, consisting of national science and technology agencies and libraries, and Microsoft Research, whose translation technology has been paired with the federated searching technology of Deep Web Technologies, Inc. The global gateway to science is hosted at the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information within the Office of Science.
Multilingual WorldWideScience.orgBETA was officially launched at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) annual conference held in Helsinki. Introducing multilingual WorldWideScience.org in a beta version will allow for broad user participation and continued evolution of its functionality.
About WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience.org was formally launched in 2007 with federated searching of 12 databases in 10 countries. Through early 2010, it had grown to search national scientific databases in 65 countries, covering some 400 million pages of science. In addition to other WorldWideScience Alliance members, key partner organizations taking part in the ceremony included the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China), and ICSTI.
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