About Us

The International School of Information Science (ISIS), a research center affiliated with Bibliotheca Alexandrina, is taking part as one of the vital partners in the Universal Networking Language (UNL) program, initiated within the United Nations and devised by the Universal Networking Digital Language (UNDL) Foundation.

The UNL program mainly addresses the issue of language diversity and is regarded as a potential solution for breaking language barriers between cultures in the digital age. The mission of the program is to enable all people to generate information and have access to cultural knowledge in their native languages. UNL is an artificial language attempting to replicate the functions of natural language in human communication. It is based on a certain workflow, where a natural language is enconverted into the UNL language and then it is deconverted back into the target natural language using the UNL system tools. Currently, 15 languages have been incorporated and a number of institutions have started to work on their respective native languages.

The UNL project is one of the main areas of research in ISIS, where Ibrahim Shihata Arabic UNL center was created targeting to design and implement the Arabic component in the development of UNL and acts as an active language center for Arabic. The Center is funded by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD) in honor of the memory of Dr. Ibrahim Shihata, an international jurist and expert on international development and a great promoter of Arabic culture.