What Is Pangaea?
About R&D
Pangaea is an R&D Non-profit Organization and its R&D mission is "Peace Engineering." The focus of R&D in Pangaea is multilingual communication and intercultural collaboration. Our research includes online surveys in various countries, field observation, and computation by collaborating with universities and research institutes.
Pictogram Communication
In order for worldwide participants to communicate with one another, Pangaea conducts research and development for pictogram communication. Our goal of this communication style lies not in precise information delivery but in heart-to-heart communication that facilitates imagination and empathy towards the counterpart existence. In addition, through collaborations with universities and research institutes, we have conducted cultural dependency research of pictogram interpretation, analysis of pictogram message logs among intercultural participants, and grounding pictogram's concept onto semantic lexicons such as WordNet.
Non-simultaneous Communication
Pangaea developed a kind of SNS (Social Networking Service) called PangaeaNet as its non-simultaneous communication platform for Pangaea Local Activity.
Design philosophy of the user interface is to employ the least text information that depends on participants' languages. Also, PangaeaNet is different from existing Web pages because most of its content consists of full of "analog" materials such as hand-drawn pictures by children participants, rather than digital images. The design philosophy provides intuitive graphical user interface and rich user experience to children participants. From contents In the PangaeaNet world, there are plenty of "bonding seeds" that facilitate interests and curiosity towards others.
Simultaneous Communication
Pangaea develops fun simultaneous communication platforms via Webcam. Existing video conference system mainly targeted business use and it required expensive hardware and software. Pangaea developed a low-cost Webcam platform that provides fun activity contents. One of its design philosophies is facilitation that matches Pangaea activity so that intercultural participants can easily enjoy a Webcam activity with minimal mental stress and foster empathy towards the counterpart. Since it only requires an inexpensive Webcam and Web browser, the Webcam system realizes low-cost and easy-setup.
Language Grid
NPO Pangaea is a
partner
NPO Pangaea is a partner of the Language Grid project. The Language Grid is an online multilingual service platform which enables easy registration and sharing of language services, such as online dictionaries, bilingual corpora, and machine translations. It is developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT.)
We are building the Pangaea Dictionary on the Language Grid, which consists of Pangaea specific words in English, German, Korean, and Japanese. Via the Language Grid, machine translation with the Pangaea Dictionary is automatically generated, which provides better translation accuracy than existing general machine translation engines.
Before we joined the Language Grid Project in 2005, we confronted language barriers in communication between staff members overseas. Now, to facilitate our understanding of each other, we use a translation tool with a registered dictionary of special terms for Pangaea. This has improved the efficiency of our work. Also, we developed the Pangaea Community Site, which is a BBS for international Pangaea facilitator staff members to communicate with each other via machine translation.
In addition, Pangaea provided Picton, pictogram designs of Pangaea, to the Language Grid as one of the language resources and it is expected to bring new interesting research areas.
Link to Language Grid Web sites
