For Release 30 May 1996
HKUST LAUNCHES CHINESE LANGUAGE WORLD WIDE WEB INDEX Web users searching for information related to Hong Kong that is written in Chinese can now get fast and efficient help from the World Wide Web Index and Search Engine (WISE), launched by researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The Chinese language index is the latest development of the WISE project, whose English component was introduced last September.
“WISE incorporates the latest information retrieval research,” says project leader Dr Dik Lun Lee (Associate Professor in Computer Science). “There is a gap between what is available commercially and what is being done in universities. Our aim in doing this project is to make available what we know about retrieving information to World Wide Web users.”
Users can type in a topic of interest in either English or Chinese and WISE will search its index on the more than 83,000 Hong Kong-based Web pages in English, or the more than 7,000 Web pages in Chinese.
WISE will then rank the documents it finds according to how frequently that topic occurs within them.
WISE users can then access the documents listed on their screen through hypertext links.
Dr Lee and his team are now working on taking the WISE project one step further. They plan to take the user’s query and search all WWW indexes, giving the user a ranking of relevant documents from around the world.
WWW users can access WISE at http://www.cs.ust.hk/IndexServer.
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