African Public Libraries Summit, September 19-21, 2012 Ahmed Al-Awah Head, Information Systems & Technical Services Library 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 Outline Context – ECA’s vision and programmes Access Scientific and Socio-economic Information in Africa (ASKIA) program Demonstration of ASKIA prototype Overview of ASKIA Features Going Forward Questions

ECA ECA’s mandate & vision The Economic Commission of Africa: established 1958 one 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

ECA Support to member states Dual 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

ECA 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

ECA ASKIA Online portal A one stop shop to all knowledge types from/on Africa Strategic interventions ASKIA FSE Facilitate 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 contextualizing Knowledge Hub Through partnerships enhance capacity of African institutions – BioMed Central, NAML, CNHR Capacity Building

ECA DATAD/ ASKIA Maps & Geo Data Scientific 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: Service A University Theses Tools & standards WWW Knowledge Hub E-Registries Service B Country Specific Maps, Media, Documents E- Directories Library OPACs Research 4Life ASKIA Online Platform ASKIA Federated Search Data Harvester Service C Media stories on African development Digital Maps of Africa Service D

ECA Demonstration

ASKIA Search Features

ECA 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).

ECA 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.”

ECA 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 ed to them Feature Benefit

ECA 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

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

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

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

ECA 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”“Clusters That Think”

ECA My Selections - Export to Ref- Works or EndNote or Mendeley - Download to RIS format - /Print

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

ECA Visualize the Result Set Visualize cluster results to see relationships between topics more easily.

ECA Clustering by Document Type

ECA Features under development… Contextualization of Sources Experts, Geo maps, Raw Data, Info graphs, Multimedia tabs Localization the ability to toggle between languages and include French, Arabic Multi-Lingual queries translated to the native language of sources for best results Mobile Apps & Social Media ASKIA apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone integrate with different social media services My ASKIA customize the standard My Selection specific to ASKIA needs allow users to save selected results for reviewing later

ECA Going Forward ASKIA Go-Live – October 2012 Federated expert online resources to be included in search results from ASKIA Develop 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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