Microsoft Research's Tony Hey speaks on multilingual federated search in Helsinki

Deep Web Technologies unveiled multilingual translation capability today for the WorldWideScience Alliance using its federated search application. WorldWideScience.org (http://www.worldwidescience.org), the international science portal, is the first application to be deployed with this unique capability. Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies, demonstrated the new technology at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information's (ICSTI) 2010 Summer Conference in Helsinki. ICSTI is a primary sponsor of the WorldWideScience.org Alliance, whose purpose is to provide "a geographically diverse, governance structure to promote and build upon the original vision of a global science gateway."

Multilingual federated search translates a user's search query into the native languages of the collections being searched, aggregates and ranks these results according to relevance, and translates result titles and snippets back to the user's original language. The translation, powered by Microsoft, makes it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the user's native language. The Conference will include a keynote address by Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, as well as a presentation by Dr. Walter Warnick, Director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

"I'm very excited about this new multilingual translation capability. It will break down the language barrier for researchers in many countries, promoting global information discovery," said Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies. "This will be particularly helpful in the areas of science, technology, government, and intelligence, where information may lie in hard-to-reach, non-English deep web collections."

While many countries have a wealth of research content in local collections, much of this information has not been translated to other languages. Deep Web Technologies' multilingual translation capability augments the company's Explorit Research Accelerator federated search engine, allowing users to search multiple collections from different countries and languages simultaneously. This release of multilingual Explorit provides for searches of collections in English, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Japanese,

Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

"Since its launch in 2007, WorldWideScience.org has grown at an absolutely phenomenal rate, providing researchers with easy access to the publicly funded research output of 65 different countries from around the world. Fast becoming the world's most important scientific resource, these new search and translation tools are absolutely essential to opening up research and enabling the global scientific community to share knowledge in the pursuit of progress," noted the WorldWideScience Alliance Chairman, Richard Boulderstone, from the British Library.

The WorldWideScience Alliance multilingual federated search launched as a beta application and is available for public search on its home page: http://www.worldwidescience.org.