Comment Articles

Pinpointing locations

Michael Kanellos CNET News

Published: 29 Mar 2004 16:35 BST

The newscaster at Qatar's Aljazeera network read off the day's headlines in Arabic in a Web video clip. A few moments later, a transcript was available in English.

The demonstration at PC Forum was a reminder of how the boundaries of what can be done with online information are being stretched. Commercial search services such as Yahoo and Google have revolutionised the ability to find vast amounts of facts on disparate topics in a short period of time. Now, start-ups and established companies are devising products that they say will extend how people work with information found on the Web or inside company databases.

University of Southern California spinoff Language Weaver, for instance, has come up with technology that performs functional translations of Internet articles or video clips on the fly. As it demonstrated with the Aljazeera clip, people can submit a Web page in French, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi or the ever-popular Somali, and a functional English version pops out in about a minute.

"In a couple of years, we will be at the level where people will not be able to distinguish between a first draft of a machine translation and a first draft of a human [translation]," Bryce Benjamin, chief executive of Language Weaver, said this week at PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz. (CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, bought conference sponsor EDventures Holdings last week.)

At the same time, MetaCarta has come up with software designed to enable intelligence agencies, oil exploration teams and marketing execs to search for documents in their own data files and then plot them geographically.

Say a car manufacturer wanted to figure out where to launch a new sports utility vehicle. A search on data tagged by MetaCarta's software would pull up documents relating to previous buyers and overlay them on a map of the United States so that the manufacturer could determine whether to launch a new car in Minnesota or Texas. A US intelligence agency search on Mohammed Atta, the so-called 19th hijacker of 11 September, sketched out a paper trail of Atta's whereabouts in Germany before the attack, according to MetaCarta.

This kind of searching isn't easy, according to John Frank, MetaCarta's president. There are 44 cities and towns called Paris and 69 called Al-Hamra around the world. Most places on the globe also have more than one name, which further complicates searches, he added. Filtering out irrelevant results remains a huge task.