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ABBYY, MediaINFO and Forefront Help to Unveil UAE History Through Journalism

November 12, 2015
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Albayan, Dubai’s oldest daily newspaper and part of the UAE government organization Dubai Media Incorporated (DMI), celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2015 and announces the start of a new nationwide, high-value, significant project – THAKERA-TECH.

The first version of the THAKERA-TECH platform was presented for the first time at Gitex Technology Week 2015. The main idea behind this unique project can be described as “memory of the nation”. DMI digitized the media heritage collected by Albayan journalists over 35 years of operation – photos, newspapers, cartoons, books and videos – to give online access to the materials to the public, including researchers, students, today’s journalists and others.

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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 to create a public resource.

The platform was uniquely developed for Albayan by Geneza, one of the leading developers and providers of media content presentation and management solutions in the Middle East and Europe, on the basis of their extremely versatile and powerful 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 older examples, 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 digitizing and content processing. The MediaINFO solution is equipped with the leading Arabic OCR and data capture technologies powered by ABBYY, a world leader in document recognition and linguistic technologies. This has allowed automation of the processing of printed editions and indexing with the highest accuracy of the extracted data in Arabic to perform effective search through the documents.

The project was awarded to Forefront Technologies, a major IT Distribution operation in the Middle East and a channel-distributor of MediaInfo and ABBYY in the region.

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 Albayan

Albayan is a major Gulf and Arab Arabic language comprehensive daily newspaper governed by Dubai Media Incorporated (DMI), United Arab Emirates. Established in 1980 by the government of Dubai, Albayan covers both local and international news and events with credibility and transparency.

About MediaINFO

MediaINFO is a complete software solution for intuitive viewing, browsing, searching, cataloguing and sharing digitized content. MediaINFO powers some of the world's most prestigious libraries, publishers, educational & government institutions, and magazines. MediaINFO helps organizations utilize and re-use their content more effectively by leveraging past investments in content and re-purposing them for new audiences, over a network or the Internet. For more information, visit mediainfo.com.

About Geneza

Geneza develops solutions for organizations seeking to better present, control, search, and manage their content. Whether your content is still only in physical form, partly digitized, in PDF, ALTO/METS, or flat tiff. We can provide an end-to-end solution that will cover your requirements. Geneza is trusted by some of the world's largest and most respected libraries, academic institutions, including The National Library of Norway, The Slovak National Library, The Slovak University of Technology, the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University Library in Bratislava and others.

About Forefront Technologies

Forefront Technologies is a major IT Distribution operation with a primary focus on Document Imaging and Storage Industry Systems and Solutions in the Middle East region. For more information, please, visit www.forefrontec.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 technologyABBYY FlexiCapture – announced at Gitex’11 and 13 respectively. ABBYY products are used in large-scale projects such as Kuwait’s National Census 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.

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