The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) recently launched their Access to Scientific and Socio-economic Information in Africa (ASKIA) portal. The federated search-based portal, built and created by Deep Web Technologies (DWT), serves as a one-stop, real-time search of multiple information sources, and includes a multilingual search and translation capability, a localised user interface and a responsive mobile design. Researchers can find information from any device in one of four languages, and translate the results back into their language when the search is finished.
The UNECA portal contributes to the goals of the ASKIA Initiative, designed to implement a single search of scientific and socio-economic knowledge by and for African researchers, academics, students, economists, policy-makers and other professionals.
Based on Deep Web Technologies' (DWT) Explorit Everywhere!™ federated search technology, the ASKIA portal searches 31 knowledge sources simultaneously. When a user performs a search, Explorit Everywhere!™, in partnership with Microsoft Translator, translates the user's query from their selected search language, English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish, to the source's language, searches for the user's query, retrieves results to the portal, and translates the results back into the user's selected languages. In addition to the multilingual search, the portal is localised to automatically update the screen text into the selected query language.
The portal includes a responsive, mobile design. Researchers viewing the ASKIA portal from their mobile device will trigger an automatic browser detection which loads a mobile-friendly version of the application. Also included is MyASKIA, which implements the Explorit Everywhere!™ MyLibrary feature allowing users to save and tag selected results under his or her account. Users can email, export, print or download results at any time.
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