1

Presentation to the

Information Technology Committee

The Jewish Agency for Israel

Board of Governors

October 2004

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Table of Contents

ERP- Update on Status

JAFI’s New Website - Update on Status

Update on the eJewish.info Initiative for

Jewish Networking

Lalan’s Activities - Update

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Update on the eJewish.info Initiative of

the Jewish Agency for Developing

Jewish Networking Infrastructures

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Purpose

Create a shared Jewish space that will

provide clear advantages, by its size,

ease of use and speed of access, for

providers of services and goods of

Jewish interest.

• When the target population is small, market fragmentation is an obstacle to the offer of high quality services/content

• A lot of good Jewish content is available in the Deep Web: Music, Audio, Video, Film, Photographs, Archives etc

• The challenge of the New Internet: Semantics

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Main lines of action

– Registry of Jewish Web

Resources and Partner Registries

– Digital Repositories and the European Digitization Policy Development Minerva Project

– Awareness and dissemination

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• May 2004

• Experts on AI and Semantic Web from

the US, Israel and Europe

• Prof. James Hendler –Director, Semantic Web and

Agent Technologies, University of Maryland

• Published OWL (Web

Ontology Language)

• Scientific advisor of the

eJewish initiative

• Pilots to begin

Semantic Web Seminar

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Jerusalem Conference• Lead by the Jewish Agency for Israel

• All Statutory Institutions in the area of

Cultural Heritage are partners

• Working Groups of Experts organized and

presented their work: Interoperability,

Quality, Common Access, Good Practice.

• European Commission Projects in the area

of ICT and Culture lead workshops

• Jerusalem Declaration – outlines the

professional and political framework

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• Concerted Policy for

Jewish Heritage Digitization

• National Foundation for Jewish

Culture and European

Association for Jewish Culture

• EPOCH – Development of EC

Supported Jewish Heritage

Digitization Program + Course Development

with the Department of Education

• Tentative agreement with Harvard:

(1) Crawling Jewish Sites

(2) Photographs Archive

(3) Metadata/RDF

Emerging Initiatives