Sina Institute at Birzeit University, with the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation (CCHP) and University of Trento from Italy through its spin-off company OKKAM s.r.l, have deployed an innovative and pioneering electronic tourist guide for heritage sites in Bethlehem, using QR technologies. The initiative is part of the EU FP7 funded SIERA project.

The goal of the initiative is to enhance the experience of Palestine’s visitors and valorize the cultural heritage of Bethlehem City, through an innovative use of smartphones and tablets.

While walking in the old city, tourists can scan a QR code with smartphones and automatically listen to an audio guidance in their own language, as well as watch video and read further description, about a certain heritage site.

The initiative targeted 8 important locations of cultural and heritage significance in the city, including the Church of Nativity, Manger Square, and Star Street, among other locations.

Mrs. Nada Atrash, the Head of the Research and Training Unit at CCHP, indicated that the initiative stands as an innovative and simple facility to provide and spread information and guidance to the visitors of the city, refuting some parts of the Israeli propaganda that strives to damage the Palestinian history and culture. Mrs. Atrash indicated that the system has been used by hundreds of tourists already, despite its young age, where the free internet connection provided by Hadara ISP facilitated the adoption of the system.

The initiative has also been praised by Dr Hamdan Taha, the deputy minister of the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Dr Taha expressed the ministry’s interest at the initiative, and hoped to extend its coverage to span the different touristic places in Palestine. Dr Taha also indicated that the initiative goes along the ministry’s plans to digitize and document the Palestinian narration through modern technologies, which should enrich the tourism industry in Palestine.

Dr Mustafa Jarrar, the director of Sina Institute at Birzeit University, stated that the QR scanning technologies has already been deployed at several domains. However, utilizing such technology within a multilingual and multimedia touristic guidance system is considered pioneering worldwide. Dr Jarrar illustrated that the initiative comes about as a result of the cooperation with Trento University in Italy and OKKAM s.r.l, which also included the Arabization of the OKKAM named entities system and enriching it with new Arabic content. Dr Jarrar concluded by stating that the initiative is still at its early stages, and hoped to extend the initiative for the remaining Palestinian sites.

After deploying the system in Bethlehem, Dr Paolo Bouquet, the professor at Trento University and the president of its spin-off company OKKAM s.r.l, expressed his contentment for the innovative and pioneering utilization of OKKAM’s platform within the tourism sector, and in Palestine in particular. Dr Bouquet explained that the system allows for dynamic content editing and modification, without having to replace the generated code. Moreover, the system doesn’t require any special software, where it can be used with any QR reader applications.

It is worth noting that, the developed system, in cooperation with OKKAM’s dynamic ObjectLinks framework, allows for bundling several media data and content types, accessible through a single QR code. The developed framework allows for dynamic content editing, which provides for efficient content generation and enhanced monitoring and statistics capabilities. The system was praised by the local and international tourists visiting Bethlehem, quoting that the new system was simple and easy to navigate, while providing very rich and multilingual content.

The initiative is part of the SIERA project at Sina Institute, which aims to  promote research cooperation with scientists around the world in the fields of Multilingual and Multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. The initiative comes about as a result of this international cooperation in the domain of knowledge sharing, which also aims at promoting Bethlehem as a center of international cultural and heritage significance.

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Where several issues related to extending Michael with Arabic were discussed , such as how to extend Michael’s functionality to allow searching in Arabic , how to extend Michael with some content from Bethlehem and how to extend Michael’s Thesaurus with Arabic. Regarding these issues, practical training on : TMP multilingual Management Platform including thesaurus import and SKOSfication ,localization  and building was applied. Such practical training will provide the partners with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve goals such as reporting and specifying the missing Arabic searching tools and APIs and integrate them with Michael engine, enriching Michael with an experimental sample of 1000 objects related to Arabic culture through Bethlehem thesaurus and building an Arabic extension for Michael and extending Michael multilingual thesaurus with Arabic concepts which will enable multilingual support.

It was agreed that Bethlehem treasures must be defined in SKOS using TMP , also Michael thesaurus should be imported into TMP, connecting Bethlehem SKOS with Michael using TMP, and define Arabic search and query processing tools to be imported into Michael search functionalities which is based on Apache Lucene/Solr  an open source enterprise search platform.

The meeting was attended by Christophe Roche (CLUNL), Rute Costa(CLUNL), Marie-Véronique (Michael),  Florent André(TMP) , Stefano Bortoli (TN) , Adnan Yahya (BZU), and Ali Salhi (BZU).

Also SIERA partners attended a workshop a day earlier (20/9/2012) in Paris , the workshop was  dedicated to the terminology management platform (TMP) – a part of FP7 Linked Heritage project.

SIERA partners conducted a technical meeting in Trento (15-20 July 2012) to discuss the upcoming deliverables in “WP2-Networking and Research Setup” workpackage. The meeting was co-located with First Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis in University of Trento, which was an opportunity for the project, for dissemination and networking.

Several issues were discussed in this meeting, including WordNet principles and ongoing developments, base concepts in WordNet, KYOTO Ontology and its mapping with WordNet, Arabic Ontology, and the Matching Function. At the end, the Mapping Framework between KYOTO-WordNet Ontology and the Arabic Ontology was discussed in details.

It was agreed that the mapping framework will include several types of mappings (such as equivalence, Types, Part-whole, and others, between concepts), and more importantly, for each mapping transaction, both accuracy and confidence will be recorded. While the notion of accuracy refers to how much a mapping is accurate, the notion of confidence refers to how much the person/program that performed this mapping is sure that this mapping. This mapping framework will be formalized in First Order Logic, including the new notion of Semantonym, which refers to the equivalency between two concepts of lexical terms from different languages.

The framework will be used to map the KYOTO-WordNet Ontology and the Arabic Ontology.This mapping will be performed in the following steps: 1- mapping the upper levels, by Amanda, 2- mapping the base concepts of WordNet into Arabic. The base concepts will be identified by Christiane and mapped by Mustafa into Arabic. 3- mapping KYOTO’s domain levels by Rana.

The meeting was attended by Paolo bouquet (TN), and Stefano Bortoli (TN), Christiane Fellbaum (BBAW), Amanda Hicks (BBAW), Rana Rishmawi (BZU), Mustafa Jarrar (BZU), and Bilal Farraj (BZU).

A workshop on proposal writing and international fundraising was organized by Sina Institute at Birzeit University. Many topics were introduced and discussed by local and international experts in the field, including how to write competitive proposals, especially FP7 proposals, the best practices and experiences in project management and proposal writing, in addition to funding programs such as TEMPUS and others.

The workshop started with an overview about EU projects at Sina Institute by Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, showing an actual and motivating example on how great ideas and successful proposals have actually led to successful projects here in Palestine.

A quick introduction on FP7 and its components was presented by Dr. Fahoum Shalabi, the FP7 national contact person in Palestine. He focused on the conditions of proposal writing, the evaluation process, and the budget assignment for different fields.

Prof. Paulo Bouquet from Trento University in Italy, gave an introduction on FP7 and the upcoming programs. He emphasized that a successful proposal is more than a great idea; it should also meet the scientific standards to compete. Afterwards, Mr. Ruben Riestra from Groupo Inmak, Spain, showed how to write a strong and competitive proposal that is capable of raising funds and that reflects a successful project, a project that has an impact and is able to survive.

Finally, several fund raising experiences were presented. Dr. Jamil Salem from the Institute of Law at Birzeit University presented some of the projects and researches that were successful in raising funds. Then a group from the Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ) presented their EU projects and the main international success standards.

1- Overview to FP7 and its Components Dr Fahoum Alshalabi

2- Inroduction to FP7 & Upcoming Programs Prof Paolo Bouquet

3-How to Design and Engineer a Competitive FP7 Proposals Ruben Riestra

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed (at the end of the First National Conference on e- Governance and e- Services) between Sina Institute at Birzeit University and four Palestinian Ministries: Ministry of Information Technology and Communication, Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Transportation, and Ministry of Local Governance. This MoU aims to sustain what have been achieved in the “Palestinian e-Government Academy” Project at Sina Institute, at the national level.
The signing parties agreed to institutionalize the academy, to become a legal body and help these, and other, ministries on how to build e-governmental services. The foreseen mission of the academy is to provide: (1) consultancy and innovative solutions, (2) advanced training, and (3) studies and research, about topics related to e-governance and e-services.
From the governmental side, the agreement also stated that the singing ministers will provide all necessary support (legal, administrative, technical, financial and fundraising) to help the academy achieve its mission.
A board of directors is established to steer the academy, headed by the Minster of Communication and Information Technology. All other parties will be also members of the board (ministers or deputy ministers).
The technical management of the academy will be led by and located at Sina Institute in Birzeit Univerity.

Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Arabic Technologies, an institute under the Faculty of Information Technology at Birzeit University, concluded the International Summer School in Information Technology. This summer school, included two courses,  has been held for the five years in a row, with the participation of both local and international university instructors providing advanced topics in the field of technology.

The International Summer School selected  both graduate and undergraduate students (a total of 30 students) in specializations related to Information Technology in Palestinian Universities.

This year, the first course covered advanced topics, in the areas of Internet Security and Computer Networks , such as Internet Protocols (e.g. BGP, OSPF, and SIP) and Multi-Media practically used by global Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Dr. Iyad Tumar, an instructor at the Faculty of Information Technology , taught the first part of the course in advanced topics in Computer Networks, as he has a PhD degree in Computer Networking. The second part of the course, advanced topics in Internet Security, was provided by Professor David Chadwick from the University of Kent. David Chadwick is an instructor specialized in the area of Information Systems Security, and has great achievements in this area.

In the second course, Prof. Paolo Bouquet and prof. Stepheno Portiolli from Italy, covered topics related to Semantic Web. Moreover, Dr. Adel Khalifa , the chairman of the Software Engineering Department at Al-Hussun University in the Emirates, talked about how to measure  the  complexity and quality of software programs.

Both the students and instructors were pleased with the success of this program and hope that this experience will be repeated in coming years .

According to Dr. Abdel Latif Abu Issa, the chairman of the Department of Computer Systems engineering and  the coordinator of the International Summer School, the program is important to the students for many reasons. One of the reasons,  is that students become aware of up-to-date topics in Information Technology from International instructors. On the other hand, students will also obtain a future opportunity of continuing their graduate studies or will be provided with recommendation letters to be able to continue their studies.

To watch the Conference Videos and click session name

Sina Institute for knowledge Engineering and Arabic Technologies at Birzeit University hosted a visit by presidents of seven Flemish Universities from Belgium. Prof. Mustafa Jarrar, the Institute director (who graduated from VUB in 2005), presented a summary about the mission, objectives, and future vision of Sina Institute, in addition to an overview of its ongoing projects. An open discussion followed to find out ways of collaboration with the various Belgium universities.

The visitors admired the accomplishments of the institute and its ongoing projects, and expressed their eagerness for future collaboration, especially that the institute research topics are in computational linguistics and its applications in several fields such as health, environment and cultural heritage.

Prof. Christiane Fellbaum of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Princeton University will be giving four lectures on topics in Ontology, lexicon and cognitive science.

You can read more about the summer school here.