As coordinator and grant holder, BZU has recently launched “SIERA,” a project with a budget of one half a million Euros (funded by the EU FP7 program), in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. The launching ceremony took place on the 24 November 2011, attended by Dr. Mashhour Abu Dakka, the Minister of Telecommunication and Information Technology; Dr. Khalil Hindi, BZU President; Dr. Adnan Yahya, Vice President for Academic Affairs; Dr. Ali Jaber, Dean of the Faulty of Information Technology; and Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, Project Coordinator. The ceremony was also attended by a number of high ranking officials and European experts, as well as IT managers in Palestinian ministries and companies.

 

The goal of the SIERA project is to reinforce closer and more sustainable scientific cooperation between Palestinian and EU scientists in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. The project’s scientific scope is indeed timely, especially as the rapid growth of cross-border markets and global concerns are creating a huge demand to facilitate knowledge sharing between societies. In fact, the diversity of languages, cultures, and standards are the main barriers to sharing and consuming knowledge. Several European programs have prioritized joint research and development in this direction, especially integrating and exploiting multilingual and multicultural content and digital libraries. Although several challenges have been resolved in this direction, many remain open. As a result, reinforcing sustainable cooperation between the Arab and EU scientists is called for at this stage to integrate and extend Arab-EU research efforts in this scope. This is what SIERA aims to realize through its activities.

Dr. Yahya affirmed the importance and significance of the scientific scope of this project as it tackles many open research problems in the field of Arabic and multilingual knowledge sharing technologies and contributes to the development of the Palestinian software industry in its increasing importance in the Palestinian economy.

Dr. Abu Dakka clarified that this project is considered a very important step towards the reinforcement of academic partnership with the EU, especially as it builds on other ongoing projects, such as the EU TEMPUS project “Pal-Gov” that aims to establish the Palestinian e-Government Academy, as well as the Zinnar project which established the Palestinian e-Government Interoperability Framework.

 

Dr. Jarrar explained the goals and activities of the project, pointing out that BZU will twin with four leading European research institutions that are pioneers in the area of multilingual knowledge sharing and have an excellent profile in research cooperation at the European and international levels. The institutes include The New University of Lisbon in Portugal, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Germany, University of Trento in Italy, and the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. Dr. Jarrar added that the collective expertise and scientific excellence of the consortium will be utilized to assist BZU in enhancing its research cooperation capacities.

It is worth mentioning that two EU multilingual knowledge sharing portals have been selected as a concrete test-bed for establishing scientific collaboration and integration. The first, MICHAEL, is a cultural heritage portal which provides a multilingual service to explore digital collections from museums, archives, libraries and other cultural institutions from across Europe. The second, KYOTO, is a wiki-portal for environment and ecology. The key idea is to use them to investigate how to enable large-scale knowledge sharing portals with Arabic language and content. In doing this, a digitalized repository of Palestinian cultural heritage and another repository in the environment domain will be provided and added to the knowledge sharing portals.  This will be done in cooperation with the project’s associate partners: the Palestinian Centre of Cultural Heritage Preservation, the Free University of Amsterdam, MICHAEL Cultural Heritage Association, the Egyptian Engineering Company for Developing Digital Systems (RDI), and the Palestinian Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Technology.