hong kong university january 2003 © 2003 michael i. shamos the million book project michael i....

HONG KONG UNIVERSITY JANUARY 2003 © 2003 MICHAEL I. SHAMOS

The Million Book Project

Michael I. Shamos, Ph.D., J.D.Director, Universal Library

School of Computer ScienceCarnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Where is Pittsburgh?


The Universal Library

• Project of Carnegie Mellon University

• All published works of mankind digitized and online

• Instantly available

• Free to read

• In any language

• Anywhere in the world

• Searchable and browsable by humans and machines

• DEMO


Why Digitize?

• Books are inefficient carriers of information

• Heavy, expensive

• Environmentally harmful

• Linear, not hyperlinked

• Poorly indexed

• Not searchable

• Not easily transported

• MOST IMPORTANT: not everyone has every book

• IN FACT, no one has every book


How Do We Convey Information?

• Books

• Orally

• Observation

• Teaching (a combination of the above)

• The book is

– Information

– AND a physical carrier

• The information can be conveyed digitally

• We don’t CARE about the carrier


Objections to Digital Books

• People can’t read books from a screen

• Books are convenient

– You can carry them

– You can write in them

– You can put a place marker in them

– You can lend them to people

• Books are beautiful

• Books smell nice


How Many Books Are There?

• 1996 World published output: 800,000 books• Total book titles ever published ~ 100M• 1 book = 500 pp., 2000 char/page

= 1 megabyte uncompressed (about 1 floppy disk)– 108 books = 1014 bytes = 100 terabytes– Disk costs HK$10 per gigabyte– 100 terabytes costs about HK$1 million

• Total books in WorldCat = 41,000,000– Requires only 41 terabytes, HK$410,000


We Can Store Everything

100 terabytes can store:

3,000,000,000 photographs (compressed)

100,000,000 books

10,000 movies

300 years of music

100 terabytes occupies 240 cubic feet on DVD

= 1 van 6 x 4 x 10 feet


We Can Send Everything

Human speech: 30 bits/sec

Gigabit Internet: 1,000,000,000 bits/sec

(This talk: < 1 millisecond including slides)

Feb. 2002 Fujitsu achieved 5 terabits per second on one optical fiber

100 terabytes = 800 terabits

It would take less than 3 minutes to transmit every book ever published


Why a Universal Library?

• The largest library in the world (U.S. Library of Congress) has less than 20% of all books– Two hours to retrieve one book

– Must travel to Washington, DC

– No copying allowed

• Largest university library: 14 million (Harvard )

• Hong Kong University: 3 million

• Typical large U.S. university: 1 million

• Largest high school: 130,000 (Philips Andover)

• Largest public high schools: 30,000 (U.S.)

• Average high school: 5,000 (U.S.)


Universal Library Goals

• Democratization of information– Knowledge is power

• Education, distance learning– “Library” for distance education

• Research, technology transfer

• Promotion of understanding

• Preservation of human culture


The Million Book Project

• A million books is a lot. CMU just reached 1 million.• Idea: scan 1 million books in each of several

countries. Make them available to everyone• NSF provided $3 million to buy scanners for China

and India• China and India are each providing 500 full-time

people for scanning• Each country is scanning 1 million books over the

next 3 years• CMU is hosting, indexing, building infrastructure


Million Book Project Operation


Effect of the Million Book Project

• All books scanned (in many languages) will be available free to read to everyone over the Internet

• Many cultural artifacts and treasures are being scanned

• All works are fully keyword-indexed and searchable• All participating countries will have complete copies

(mirrors) of all content• Knowledge will be available to all


Partners

• China – Beijing University – Chinese Academy of Science – Fudan University – Ministry of Education of China – Nanjing University – Shanghai Jiaotung University– State Planning Commission of China – Tsinghua University – Zhejiang University


Partners

• India – Arulmigu Kalasalingam College Of Engineering – Goa University – Indian Institute of Information Technology - Allahabad – Indian Institute of Science – International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad – Shanmugha Arts,Science,Technology & Research Academy – Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams – Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation – University of Pune


The Copyright Problem

• Compulsory License– Owner CAN’T refuse; user MUST pay– Limited in US (Music: 1.55¢/min, 8.0¢/song)– Extensive compulsory licensing in Japan

• Flat-fee subscription (e.g. HBO)• Free (subsidized by government)• Public Lending Right (UK)• “Buy” button• Metered use (electric company)• Micropayments


Roadblocks

• Biggest obstacle: librarians• Belief that the project is too large• No funding

– In the U.S., everyone assumes it is being done– Outside the U.S., everyone assume the U.S. is doing it

• Copyright• Myriad of small independent digital libraries


Policy Challenges

• Convenience displaces quality (Gresham)• What to digitize first?• Suitable copyright law• Economics (Who pays? Who gets?)• Privacy• Reliability of information• Change in the nature of teaching, learning


LAYERED UL MODEL

UNIVERSAL LIBRARY:DIGITIZED ITEMS

NAVIGATION TOOLSRETRIEVER SERVICE

CUSTOMCATALOGS

HYPERTEXTGENERATORS

SEARCHERS

TRANSLATORSNEWS AGENTS

HUMANUSERS

DIRECTMACHINE

USERS

HUMANUSERS

ENCYCLOPEDIA

VALUE-ADDED SERVICES

BASELINE UL SERVICES


The Universal Dictionary

• A glossary containing every word in every language, with a translation

• Use: indexing the Universal Library• Now has 1 million words (26 languages)• 2 million by February (50 languages) • 3 million by May (80 languages)


QA&


Multilingual Searching

• Find all documents containing “elephant”• Find all documents about elephants

– Even if the word “elephant” does not occur in the document

• Translation, transliteration– Book titles, works of art, proper names– Idioms, colloquial phrases


Use of © Content

• Philosophy: must pay for use– Authors, publishers must not lose

• Implied license• Bulk licensing • Compulsory licensing


The Universal Dictionary

• Lexicon of all words in all languages, with English translations, e.g.

• Obtained from– Web dictionaries– Scanning + OCR– Publishers machine-readable form

• Uses:– Indexing the Universal Library– Machine translation– Spelling correction– Linguistic studies


Technological Challenges

• Input (scanning, digitizing, OCR)• Data representation

– text, kset, notations, images, web pages• Navigation and Search• Multilingual Issues• Output (voice, pictures, virtual reality)• Synthetic documents


Navigation

• Keyword searching does not scale– Imagine 106 hits

• Browsing, finding, searching, flying • Fractal view

– Keys are granularity and connectivity• View whole collections or one glyph

– Hyperbolic trees, virtual reality, discovered similarities


Hyperbolic Tree Navigation


Multilingual Issues

• Character sets

• RepresentationsÍîäà ôèçè÷åñêè íàõîäèòñÿ â çäàíèè Èçâåñòèé

Нода физически находится в здании Известий

• Multilingual navigation

• Translation assistance


UNIVERSAL LIBRARY STATUS

• >10,000 digital volumes• Public-domain issues of the New York Times• Portal to hundreds of other collections• Art, music, video, Internet radio• Magazines, newspapers, journals• Installing 1.25 terabytes

Visit www.ulib.org


Language Identification

• Given a string x, which language(s) is it from?– What language is “peogwir” from?

• Given x, which language(s) does it seem to be from?– “contrefaçon” “dazs” “chalupa” “mbwewe”

• Character set may be unknown• Brief input (e.g. single word)• Intermixed languages

– “Zeitgeist Fever”• Neologisms, slang, abbreviations


Generative Approach

• Assume that the lexicon of a language L is generated by a probabilistic finite-state machine ML

<

a

b

z

a

z

>

a

z

>

a

z

>

a

z

>

STARTOF WORD

PROB THAT WORDSTARTS WITH A

PROB THAT WORDSTARTS WITH Z

PROB (a|<a)

PROB (>|<a)

PROB (a|<z)

PROB (z|<z)

PROB (z|<za)

> PRODUCT =PROB (<aza>)

> PRODUCT =PROB (<zaz>)


Problems

• Where do all the required probabilities come from?• How can they all be stored?• If string x does not actually occur in a language, its

probability will be zero. Won’t work for neologisms or misspellings.

• “Moving trigrams” work


Searching Mathematics

0

2sin2

dxxe x

Has this integral ever been evaluated?


Searching Mathematics

0

2sin2

dxxe x

4/92

22

MATHEMATICA C.F.:

Integrate[

Times[Power[E,Times[

-1,Power[V1,2]]],

Sin[Power[V1,2]]],

{V1,0,Infinity}]


Hierarchical Nature of Aboutness

• What does it mean to say that a book is “about” chemistry? Can a word be about chemistry?

• If one paragraph is about chemistry, is the book about chemistry?

• If the book is about chemistry, is every sentence in it about chemistry?

• Aboutness is central to cataloging and retrieval


Aboutness HierarchyUniverse

Word

Sentence

Paragraph

Section

Chapter

Collection

BookNewspaper

Article

Photograph

Object

3D Artifact

Glyph

KEYWORD SEARCHINGOCCURS HERE

SUBJECT SEARCHINGOCCURS HERE


Thesauri and Aboutness

• A set of numbered thesaurus entries defines a topic• Thesaurus is topic-hierarchical• 1011 Hindrance

– 1011.5 barrier, bar, gate, fence, wall, rampart, dam, moat …

• A word is “about” any topic to which it belongs Dam:– 241.1 lake– 293.7 close (v.)– 560.11 mother– 757.2 horse– 856.11 put a stop to (v.)– 1011.5 barrier

Thesaurus + aboutness hierarchy canbe used to disambiguate meaningswithout “understanding”

Note: topic numbers are languageindependent


Set Theory of Aboutness

• Given a finite universe W of objects (e.g. all words)• Define a topic T W to be a subset of W (a wordlist)• Topic inclusion (defines the hierarchy):

– Topic T includes topic S iff S T • Definition of aboutness:

– A subset P W of the universe (e.g., a book) is about topic T iff P T (intersection is nonempty)

• Hierarchical nature of aboutness:– If P is about S and T includes S, then P is also about T


We Can Search a Few Things

• Text• In the Roman alphabet• “Hidden” databases effectively unsearchable• No images or two-dimensional structures

– math– music– dance notation . . .

• No subject index of photographs or art– Corbis is one of the “best”

hong kong university january 2003 © 2003 michael i. shamos the million book project michael i....

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