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

1. Promoting Access to Scientific & Socio-economic Information in/on Africa (ASKIA)A UNECA Program UNECA African Public Libraries Summit, September 19-21, 2012 Ahmed Al-AwahHead, Information Systems & Technical Services Library and Information Management Services ICT, Science and Technology Division (ISTD) United Nations Economic Commission for Africa

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. Geo-data Repository Access to thousands of maps from Africa A one stop shop to all knowledge types from/on Africa ASKIA Online portal Through partnerships enhance capacity of African institutions – BioMed Central, NAML, CNHR Capacity Building Facilitate collation, discovery of knowledge on/from Africa through a single search Values added services through information contextualizing ASKIA FSE Knowledge Hub Strategic interventions

7. Service A Service B Service C Service D Country Specific Maps, Media, Documents Media stories on African development University Theses Digital Maps of Africa ASKIA Federated Search Data Harvester Scientific Databases DATAD/ ASKIA E-Directories Maps & Geo Data Research 4Life WWW E-Journals Library OPACs University A University B ASKIA Online Platform • Community Corner • Members information • E-forums - CoPs • Blog- Best practices • Project Mgmt Tools Tools & standards Knowledge Hub E-Registries Information Resources on the Internet ASKIA: http://www.uneca.org/askia

8. Demonstration http://askia.uneca.org

9. ASKIA Search Features

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

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

12. Features at a glance Feature Benefit

13. 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

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

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

16. 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”

17. 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”

18. My Selections - Export to Ref-Works or EndNote or Mendeley - Download to RIS format - Email/Print

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

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

21. Clustering by Document Type

22. 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

23. 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

24. THANK YOU!!!FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @ECA_ASKIA