Albayan, a daily newspaper by Dubai Media Incorporated (DMI) announced the start of a new nation-scale and value project – Thakera-Tech – and presented the first version of the platform at GITEX Technology week 2015.
The main idea behind the project can be described as “a memory of the nation”. The DMI digitised the media heritage collected by Albayan journalists through over 35 years – photos, cartoons, newspapers, articles, books and videos – to give online access to the materials to the public, including researchers, students and today’s journalists etc. Thakera-Tech can be translated from Arabic as “digital memory”, which perfectly describes DMI’s main goal – to preserve the historic pictorial and textual materials by Albayan, covering all important news and events of the region, and create a public resource.
The digitising project was developed for Albayan by Geneza, the developers and providers of media content presentation and management solutions in the Middle East and Europe, on the basis of their versatile presentation system – MediaINFO Digital Library. The platform will give online device and browser-independent access to the whole of Albayan’s rich historical collection of printed photos, newspapers, books and videos, including the old ones, to search through the content with the help of a modern user-friendly interface and descriptive metadata in Arabic and English.
Thakera-Tech’s go-to-life is planned to the end of the year thanks to high automation of digitising and content processing. MediaINFO solution is equipped with Arabic OCR and data capture technologies powered by ABBYY, a world leader in document recognition and linguistic technologies. This allowed to automate processing of the printed editions and indexing with the highest accuracy of the extracted data in Arabic to perform effective search through the documents.
As a result of the project, DMI and Albayan will have a unique opportunity to display the history of the nation and its astounding achievements. Updates about the project will be available at http://thakera-tech.com.
About ABBYY
ABBYY is a world leader in document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies and services. In the Gulf region, ABBYY is renowned for the best-in-class Arabic OCR – ABBYY FineReader and ABBYY Recognition Server – and full-fledged Arabic Data Capture technology – ABBYY FlexiCapture – announced at Gitex’11 and 13 respectively. ABBYY products are used in large-scale projects such as Kuwait’s National Cencus and censuses in other countries of the regions, attestation of Kuwait Transparency Society, creation of audio-text books in Arabic for visually impaired students of Yarmouk University in Jordan and more. For more information please visit www.ABBYY.com.
