Wednesday, Dec 12, 2012
Dubai: The Telecommunication Regulatory Authority along with Google, announced December 12, Arabic Internet Day, as a way to promote Arabic content on the internet, during a workshop that aims to enrich Arabic digital content.
Dr Abdul Qader Al Khayat, chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Information and Communication Technology Fund (ICT Fund), said that they aim to increase credible, reviewed Arabic content. He added that Google has had many initiatives in this regards.
The ICT fund is an initiative by the TRA that aims to spur the creation of a significant ICT industry in the UAE by funding research and projects related to the ICT sector. Al Khayat said that they have dedicated Dh25 million over the next five years, Dh5 million every year to provide support to organisations that contribute to the generation of reliable Arabic internet content.
Samir Al Bahaie, regional policy and government affairs manager at Google, said Arabic is one of the top seven most used languages on the internet and is predicted to rise to the fourth place in 2015.
“There are 90 million Arab users from the Arab region. That is a big rate of internet penetration.” he said. He added that there are 260 million video views on Youtube daily from the Arab region, and so creating credible content is very important.
“There is a fair amount of user-generated Arabic content, but we are pushing through these initiatives to have content from trusted sources,” Al Bahaie said.
He explained that there is a great need for credible educational content, as 50 — 60 per cent of the population is under the age of 25, and search for such content.
One of the problems facing Arabic content, Al Bahaie said, was that sources such as books are uploaded on PDF files or images, and so the search engine does not recognise it and does not index it correctly. He also said that some people upload videos of very useful lectures by renowned scientists and lectures, but without adding a description and so it does not show up in searches.
“We are trying to teach people to input the content correctly so the search engine could pick it up and it would not get buried in the search results,” Al Bahaie said.
The TRA launched UAEPedia in October this year in a move to increase trusted Arabic content online. UAEPedia is designed to become the first comprehensive online encyclopaedia in the UAE. It has 18 main topics and thousands of articles fall under them.
In the year 2010, the UAE was among the first three countries to get an Arabic URL, .emarat. Mohammad Al Zarouni, director of .ae Domain Administration at the TRA said that “URLs were only limited to Latin characters, but now people can enter the URLs using Arabic characters that they understand.”
He added that the Arab league applied for a new domain name, .arab, and they are waiting for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approval. Al Zarouni said that it is expected to be launched in 2013.
By Noorhan Barakat Staff Reporter
Gulf News 2012. All rights reserved.
