Intiative

Introduction

Information Technology (IT) nowadays plays an important role especially in developing countries. In addition, one of the measurements of the progress of these nations is the level of IT possession and proper usage. IT has changed human ways of exchanging information, gaining knowledge and providing services. One of a well-known form of IT is the internet. The internet has become a means for the speakers of many languages to preserve their culture and enrich their knowledge by providing large digital content covering various subjects in the form of text and multimedia. The digital content on the web has become an important base for different activities and industries these days. Although many languages have a large share of the web content, Arabic digital content remains very low. Its proportion is far less than that of the number of Arabic speakers, 0.3% and 5%, respectively. Due to these facts, King Abdullah Initiative for Arabic Content was launched. It is meant to raise the Arabic content on the web quantitatively and qualitatively beside the needed accessing tools.

The Initiative Projects

The initiative implementation has been assigned to KACST. KACST is working with other institutions within and outside the Kingdom to develop tools that help enriching the content such as dictionaries, search engines, morphological analyzers, speech recognition systems, and optical character recognition systems. KACST is also working towards enriching Arabic content itself by cooperating with different organizations and companies such as Google, Wikipedia and national libraries to create more open Arabic content and to raise its quality KACST has already started execution some project including: a strategic and road map plan for the initiative, translating tens of scientific books into Arabic, an Arabic interactive dictionary, Arabic open content and multimedia center. Other activities have been also organized including content enrichment competition, symposiums, meetings, and workshops. KACST is working towards starting other projects with related partners since Arabic digital content is not the responsibility of KACST or the Kingdom alone; it is the duty of all Arabic speakers. However, KACST will take the lead and pave the road for any tools or methods that would end up with enriching Arabic content, so, other parties can continue and fulfill the remaining elements. For further information, - please visit the Initiative website