About UIS RUSSIA project

UIS RUSSIA is in the Internet since 2000 serving as a collective thematic resource in social and political sciences with free access for the Russian universities and academia, public libraries, NGO as well as for individual users - professors, investigators, students and general public.

The UIS RUSSIA maintains basic collections of social domain data and documents - RF state agencies publications (laws, presidential decrees, government regulations), international agreements of RF, daily records of parliament's plenary sessions, state statistics, election data, analytical reports of government agencies and independent think tanks, academic publications, mass media, public opinion polls data, international organizations data, etc. The system incorporates 1 200,000+ documents (in full text) and 55,000+ tables from 60+ collections, the whole volume is 20 Gb, daily update - up to 1,5 - 2 Mb.

The collections are obtained for free from holders/providers under Agreements on Cooperation, with regular update and available retrospective coverage.

To arrange such a scope of dynamically growing collections and integrate into a system the know how of automatic linguistic analysis is accomplished, it is based on the team's long-term fundamental research in linguistics and applied investigations. Main element of the Automatic Linguistic Text Processing (ALTP) technology is the Thesaurus on Social and Political Domain, in current version it covers 70,000 descriptors and terms/synonyms. Thesaurus-based terminological analysis provides for conceptual indexing, classification and annotation of electronic text corpora. Technology is implemented to process all types of data and documents collections for social research.

The analysis results are utilized to support advanced search engine and value-added user services. Accomplished on top of traditional instruments are:

• UIS RUSSIA SSH-based search,
• Congressional Research Service, LC, SSH- based search,
• JEL-based search for academic articles in economics,
• Thesaurus-based navigation and query refinement,
• relevancy-based ranging of query results,
• statistics tables hyperlinking with Methodological notes and Glossary,
• etc.

All the collections may be cross searched. Automatic topic query update is accomplished.

Under the project special complex of procedures are implemented to provide for additional functionality - academic (value-added) services to assist in investigations.

The UIS RUSSIA is available on equal basis and for free to all RF and CIS countries - 200+ universities and academic institutions, local, regional, federal agencies access the system as collective users, 2000+ specialists work as individual users. The access is free but registration is needed due to several commercial collections being provided for by the holders only for research and education purposes. Foreign social sciences specialists may also register to access.

The collections allowed by holders for free dissemination are available for public use without registration.

The project has been being developed since 1993 by consorted efforts of the Moscow State University Research Computing Center and Autonomous Non-commercial Organization Center for Information Research and supported by the Russian and foreign foundations' grants. The team consists of 25 specialists and accommodated at the Moscow State University Research Computing Center.

The UIS RUSSIA was initially designed as an internationally used resource. Special investigations are undertaken to develop bilingual search tools and make value-added services available for foreign users. Thesaurus is translated into English utilizing terminology of the most developed thesauri in English - the Congressional Research Service, LC; United Nations; Westlaw; EVROVOC as well as dictionaries and the WordNet.

UIS RUSSIA version with search instruments in English in available in a test mode at http://www.cir.ru/eng. The collections may be cross-search, utilizing:

• several SSH;
• Thesaurus-based navigation and query refinement;
• bibliographic data.

Work underway is on a structural annotation (main topics and links between) in English to compliment each text in Russian.

Phone/fax: +7-(095)–939—3390, 939-3015

e-mail: webmaster@mail.cir.ru