An Italian Academic Delegation from the University of Milano-Bicocca has visited the Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Technology in Ramallah. Among the delegation is the world-wide expert of Databases and e-Government, Prof. Carlo Batini and the OECD consultant of e-Governance, Dr. Gianluigi Viscusi. The delegation met Eng. Sulaiman Zuhairi, deputy minister of Telecom and Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, the minister’s consultant, where they discussed the possibilities of future cooperation on e-Government projects.
A workshop was conducted during the visit at the Ministry of Telecommunication with the participation of directors of IT in several Palestinian ministries and governmental agencies in addition to managers of some Palestinian ICT companies. During the workshop, Prof. Batini presented the Italian approach to data governance. After that, Dr. Jarrar presented the Palestinian e-Government Interoperability Framework ‘Zinnar’ which was then discussed with the Italian professors. During the workshop, many questions and comments were raised by the participants to compare different approaches of Data governance.
The academic delegation’s visit to the Ministry of Telecommunication is part of their visit to Birzeit University for research purposes and to lecture at the IT Summer school organized by the Faculty of IT at Birzeit University. It is worth mentioning here that the University of Milano-Bicocca has partnered with Birzeit University in the GovSeer project funded by the Italian Cooperlink program. The project aims to support mobility and exchange of researchers between both universities in order to facilitate joint research activities in the area of e-Governance and interoperability, in particular: service ontology engineering.
