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Abu-Ghazaleh Launches TAG-PEDIA at Arab Internet Governance Forum in Kuwait

18-Oct-2012 | Source : | Visits : 7841

Special to ag-IP-news Agency

KUWAIT - HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, chairman of Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAG-Org) announced the launch of TAG-PEDIA, a general Arabic digital encyclopedia as one of TAG-Org's initiatives at the First Arab Internet Governance Forum held October 9-11, 2012 at Kuwait Regency Hotel.

The Forum is a platform for dialogue for all stakeholders representing governments, the private sector, civil society, academics, technical community, regional and international organizations to discuss and debate topics and issues concerning the use of the Internet that is important and relevant to the Arab region.

In his announcement, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh introduced TAG-PEDIA that has so far compiled more than 450,000 informative entries from across the Arab world on a variety of sciences and other topics.

"It is independent, free, supervised and revised. It is the first initiative of its kind that targets Arab academics, scholars and readers, and provides them with general knowledge from an Arabic cultural, historical, and educational perspective," he said.

"TAG-PEDIA aims at founding a free-access database that delivers a broad variety of knowledge in all humanitarian sciences, with the highest standards of quality, integrity, and accuracy. It also gives the chance for readers/users to augment the content through contributing to the Encyclopedia without prejudicing the rights of its original author," he added.

According to Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh, a team of researchers, academics, historians and language experts are behind the exciting work of TAG-PEDIA.

Moreover, he suggested setting up an Arab Internet Governance Forum, which could be called the Arab Internet Governance Observatory, with the main function of monitoring key developments in Internet governance arrangements and policies and bring these to the attention of all stakeholders in the region and a Working Group to study and analyze recent developments and make proposals for a well-conceived Arab position on key technical and public- policy issues.

"We look forward to developing consensus on regional Arab Internet governance that can facilitate comprehensive access to resources, content, and tools, which will form the engine for innovation for the society as a whole," he stated.

Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh concluded:"We also need to send a strong message against the fragmentation of the Internet. And pre-empt that Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) needs to expedite its multilingualization process. We want to see Arabic characters, on equal standing with the English characters, for the benefit of over half a billion users."

The Forum, hosted by Kuwait Information Technology Society and held under the umbrella of the League of Arab States and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), is the Arabic version of the Internet Governance Forum which is held annually under the umbrella of the UN based on the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society.

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