African Public Libraries Summit, September 19-21, 2012

Ahmed Al-Awah

Head, Information Systems & Technical ServicesLibrary and Information Management Services

ICT, Science and Technology Division (ISTD)United Nations Economic Commission for Africa

Promoting Access to Scientific & Socio-economic Information in/on Africa (ASKIA)

A UNECA Program

UNECA

ECA

OutlineContext – ECA’s vision and programmes Access Scientific and Socio-economic Information in Africa (ASKIA) programDemonstration of ASKIA prototypeOverview of ASKIA FeaturesGoing ForwardQuestions

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ECA’s mandate & vision

The Economic Commission of Africa:established 1958one of the UN Secretariat's five regional commissions 5 Sub-Regional Offices (SROs): Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Zambia & Cameroon

to promote economic and social development, foster intra-regional integration, and promote international cooperation for Africa's development

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Support to member statesDual role as regional arm of the UN & part of the regional institutional landscape

Provides a vantage position to harness resources and make unique contributions to assist member States' efforts to address their development challenges

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ASKIA Programme

Access to Scientific/Socio-economic Knowledge in/on Africa (ASKIA) Initiative:

defines a framework for bringing together a variety of scientific and socio-economic and associated information to the African community; Is an implementation programme for the African Virtual Libraries Information Network (AVLIN) established by member states/ECA at the CODI meeting Identifies 5 strategic areas of intervention working in synergy to achieve the overall program objective

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ASKIA Online portal

A one stop shop to all knowledge types from/on Africa

Strategic interventions

ASKIA FSEFacilitate collation, discovery of knowledge on/from Africa through a single search

Geo-data Repository

Access to thousands of maps from Africa

Values added services through information contextualizingKnowledge Hub

Through partnerships enhance capacity of African institutions – BioMed Central, NAML, CNHR

Capacity Building

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DATAD/ASKIA Maps &

Geo DataScientific

Databases

University A

University B

E-Journals

Community Corner •Members information•E-forums - CoPs•Blog- Best practices •Project Mgmt Tools

Information Resources on the Internet

ASKIA: http://www.uneca.org/askia

Service A

University Theses

Tools & standards

WWW

Knowledge Hub

E-Registries

Service B

Country Specific Maps, Media, Documents

E-Directories Library

OPACsResearch

4Life

ASKIA Online PlatformASKIA

Federated Search

Data Harvester

Service C

Media stories on African development Digital Maps

of Africa

Service D

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Demonstration

http://askia.uneca.org

ASKIA Search Features

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It is estimated that there is more than 500 times more content in the Deep Web than the Surface Web.

What is the Deep Web?The Deep Web is a collection of internet information sources that are generally not accessible to web spiders or crawlers and cannot, therefore, be indexed for search by popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing (aka the Surface Web).

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One query…multiple distributed databases…single result set….

What is Federated Search?“Federated Search is an application or

service that allows users to submit a real-time search in parallel to multiple, distributed information sources and retrieve aggregated, ranked and de-duplicated results.”

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Features at a glance

Incremental results Users get results fast!

Intelligent clustering Users can browse concepts not just keywords, and use filters

Powerful connectors Users go deeper and see better results from each source

Relevance Ranking Users see most relevant results across all sources at the top

Alerts Users receive the newest results emailed to them

Feature Benefit

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AND, OR, NOT

Advanced Search Page• Unlimited categories (sources can be in multiple categories)

• Select sources to search• One or Two columns• Fielded Searching• Boolean Searching

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Incremental display of search results – Users get their results fast!

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Results Page• Incremental Results• Spell Check• Ranked Results• Collection Status• Sort/Refine/Limit• Intelligent Clustering• Email/Print

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Relevance Ranking

•Occurrence of search terms within titles & snippets

•Assigning weight to sources•More current results are assigned

greater weight

Read: “Ranking: The Secret Sauce for Searching the Deep Web”

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Intelligent Clustering•Real-time semantic

analysis of results creates clusters on-the-fly.

•Discover relationships behind the results, not just “keywords.”

Read: “Clusters That Think”

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My Selections - Export to Ref-

Works or EndNote or Mendeley

- Download to RIS format

- Email/Print

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Alerts• Delivery online or via email• Daily, Weekly, Monthly• Pick and choose your sources• Export to RSS reader• Maintain database of past

results

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Visualize the Result Set

Visualize cluster results to see relationships between topics more easily.

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Clustering by Document Type

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Features under development…Contextualization of Sources

Experts, Geo maps, Raw Data, Info graphs, Multimedia tabs

Localizationthe ability to toggle between languages and include French, Arabic

Multi-Lingualqueries translated to the native language of sources for best results

Mobile Apps & Social MediaASKIA apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phoneintegrate with different social media services

My ASKIAcustomize the standard My Selection specific to ASKIA needsallow users to save selected results for reviewing later

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Going Forward

ASKIA Go-Live – October 2012Federated expert online resources to be included in search results from ASKIADevelop partnerships with various institutions in Africa to further develop ASKIA Capacity building initiatives to assist institutions in Africa to capture, manage, and disseminate their knowledge

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THANK YOU!!!

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @ECA_ASKIA