Knowledge4All

The aim of the Knowledge4All project was to make all the knowledge existing in German-speaking countries in the field of mobility available to researchers from other language areas without language barriers.

Client: bmvit, mobility of the future 5th call for tenders

Duration: January 2010 to December 2010 (12 months)

Project partners: none

Project description: Linguistic diversity represents a major challenge and at the same time a major barrier to the efficient use and networking of all available knowledge across national and linguistic borders. Especially in the field of transport and mobility, with all its sub-disciplines, a very extensive knowledge exists internationally. A considerable proportion of this is written in English and is therefore only available in this language. However, a large part of all knowledge is available in the respective national language and can therefore not at all or only to a limited extent be used due to language barriers. This knowledge is very difficult or impossible to find with simple search queries via the internet. The consequence of this is in part a very inefficient use of the resource “international knowledge” in the field of transport and mobility.

Making all this knowledge available independent of language barriers for research, development, science, teaching, industry, politics, administration etc. must be a central goal for the near future in order to develop and further improve sustainable and efficient transport systems as efficiently as possible. The aim of knowledge4all was to develop a concept in which internet-based search queries in selected and high-quality traffic knowledge platforms or traffic databases leads to results in the respective “search language”, irrespective of the language in which the search is performed and irrespective of the language in which the knowledge is available. If this automated multilingualism were to be implemented at a later date, this would make internationally available knowledge unrestrictedly accessible to everyone and thus bring an enormous advantage for all users and the traffic-science community as a whole.

Contact: Alex Schubert