CLUNL

SIERA – Integrating Sina Institute into the European Research Area

Identification

• Project identification: SIERA – Integrating Sina Institute into the European Research Area                                       [ ID 295006 ]
• Coordinator: Mustafa Jarrar (Birzeit University, Palestine)
• Responsible at CLUNL: Rute Costa (Lexicology, Lexicography and Terminology group)
• Duration: Oct. 2010 – Sep. 2014
• Funding entity: European Union – FP7
• Website: http://sina.birzeit.edu/SIERA/

Description

“SIERA is an EU FP7 funded project in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. The idea of SIERA emerged as a response to the rapid growth of cross-border markets and global concerns which is generating a huge demand to facilitate knowledge sharing between societies. In fact, the diversity of languages, cultures, and standards are the main barriers to sharing and consuming knowledge.

The objective of SIERA project is to reinforce closer and sustainable scientific cooperation between Palestinian and EU scientists in the field of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing technologies. Sina institute will twin with four leading European research institutions that are pioneers in this field to: (i) Widening the R&D strategy of BZU Sina Institute, (ii) setting up joint research and cooperation, (iii) facilitating PhD students co-supervision, (iv) Organizing joint summer courses, (v) building competency and facilitating the participation of BZU Sina Institute in FP7, and (vi) increasing the visibility and impact of BZU Sina Institute at the regional and international levels.

Two domains are selected as testbeds: (A) Cultural Heritage and (B) Environment and Ecology. For cultural heritage, a large set of Palestinian digital content will be integrated with MICHAEL, which is a large EU portal of digital collections from museums, archives, and libraries across Europe. The second, KYOTO, a multilingual wiki-portal about environment and ecology, will be also extended to support Arabic language and content. Extending such portals to support Arabic content and semantic search is a challenging task due to the complexity of the language, and as the Arabic content needs to be semantically interlinked with EU content.”

(Retrieved from the project website.)

Collaborators from CLUNL

Rute Costa (principal investigator)
Christophe Roche

Participating entities

Sina Institute – Birzeit University (Palestine)
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal)
Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften (Germany)
University of Trento (Italy)
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy)

Associate partners

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Michael Culture Association
Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation
Ministry of Telecom and Information Technology
Engineering Company for the Development of Digital Systems