Update on the eJewish.info Initiative of the Jewish Agency for Developing Jewish Networking Infrastructures. Presentation to the Information Technology Committee, Board of Governors, The Jewish Agency for Israel, October 2004

1. Presentation to the
Information Technology
Committee
The Jewish Agency for Israel
Board of Governors
October 2004
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2. Table of Contents
ERP- Update on Status
JAFI’s New Website - Update on Status
Update on the eJewish.info Initiative for
Jewish Networking
Lalan’s Activities - Update
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3. Update on the eJewish.info Initiative of
the Jewish Agency for Developing
Jewish Networking Infrastructures
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4. Purpose
Create a shared Jewish space that will
provide clear advantages, by its size,
ease of use and speed of access, for
providers of services and goods of
Jewish interest.
• When the target population is small, market fragmentation
is an obstacle to the offer of high quality services/content
• A lot of good Jewish content is available in the Deep Web:
Music, Audio, Video, Film, Photographs, Archives etc
• The challenge of the New Internet: Semantics
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5. Main lines of action
– Registry of Jewish Web
Resources and Partner Registries
– Digital Repositories and the
European Digitization Policy
Development Minerva Project
– Awareness and dissemination
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6. Semantic Web Seminar
• May 2004
• Experts on AI and Semantic Web from
the US, Israel and Europe
• Prof. James Hendler –Director, Semantic Web and
Agent Technologies, University of Maryland
• Published OWL (Web
Ontology Language)
• Scientific advisor of the
eJewish initiative
• Pilots to begin
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7. Jerusalem Conference
• Lead by the Jewish Agency for Israel
• All Statutory Institutions in the area of
Cultural Heritage are partners
• Working Groups of Experts organized and
presented their work: Interoperability,
Quality, Common Access, Good Practice.
• European Commission Projects in the area
of ICT and Culture lead workshops
• Jerusalem Declaration – outlines the
professional and political framework
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8. Emerging Initiatives
• Concerted Policy for
Jewish Heritage Digitization
• National Foundation for Jewish
Culture and European
Association for Jewish Culture
• EPOCH – Development of EC
Supported Jewish Heritage
Digitization Program + Course Development
with the Department of Education
• Tentative agreement with Harvard:
(1) Crawling Jewish Sites
(2) Photographs Archive
(3) Metadata/RDF
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