News

Conference on digital language concluded at the BA

Alexandria, 7^th December— The Bibliotheca Alexandrina hosted the International Conference on the Convergence of Knowledge, Culture, Language and Information Technologies, which concluded its sessions, Saturday 6^th of December.           Dr. Tarcisio G. Della Senta, President of the Universal Digital Language Foundation (UNDL), presided over the closing session where he declared the conference’s recommendations concerning the future aspects of UNDL. These included:

• Carrying out a joint publishing project between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the UNDL by the year 2004. An editorial house has already been contacted to reach an agreement on publishing several selected papers about the convergence of knowledge, culture, language and information technologies.
• Strengthening the UNDL in the Arab world by improving its quality and making its services available to a wider range of people. Both Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria and Dr. Noha Adly, Director of the ICT Department in the Library, expressed their readiness to cooperate with similar entities in Egypt, Jordan and other parts of the Arab world.
• Developing a UNDL Encyclopedia, building it up with the required knowledge and distributing it through the Internet.

Dr. Della Senta also referred to the introduction of the UNDL through the upcoming ‘World Summit on Information Society’, which will be held in Geneva from 10 - 12 December 2003. This conference is considered part of the build up of ‘worldwide ware’, which will be concluded with another summit in Tunisia, scheduled for July 2005. “We are embarked on one of the most exciting adventures that humanity has ever taken”, said Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in his address to the meeting. He explained that UNL would remove the existing barrier of diversity between the different languages and cultures. “I dream of a day when intelligent machines will help each of us to access in our language the wealth of production of the human mind. True cumulative knowledge across space and time will be available to all”. Serageldin also pointed out the disadvantages of establishing one language for the entire world. “We must still ask ourselves if the resulting language produced by massive amounts of translated documents would destroy the beauty of the language that we have come to know [,] use and love”.  The International Conference on Convergence was jointly organized by the Bibliotheca, the Universal Digital Language Foundation (UNDL) and the Arabic Language Center of the Royal Scientific Society (Jordan). Convergences’03 addressed the necessity of fostering dialogue among civilizations, by developing a unifying digital language as a way of building peace, development and welfare for all nations.