UN official calls Arab states to give top priority to building knowledge society

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Dr. Najat Rochdi, Regional Co-ordinator of Information and Communication Technologies for Development in the Arab Region (ICTDAR) of the Unite Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said that knowledge gap, rather than the income gap, determines the prospects of countries in today's Arab economy.

'The capacity to produce knowledge is recognized as the most important factor in determining the region's future prosperity,' she said.

Rochdi was giving the keynote address in the first session on Knowledge Management at the 3rd Conference on Documentation and Electronic Archiving, which was opened on Saturday at Dubai World Trade Centre. The three-day conference is being held under the theme, 'Knowledge Investment and Management for Decision Support.'

In Rochdi's opinion, appropriate institutional structures and decisive political will, supported by adequate resources, especially on the pan-Arab level is the need of the hour in the Arab region.

Dr. John Girard, Associate Professor of Business Administration and Business Information at Minot State University, USA, spoke about developing a course toward a knowledge environment: Using knowledge management to enhance decision making.

His paper introduced a new model of knowledge management enablers, which was designed to help Canadian Government leaders conquer the knowledge challenges of today - to help them make better decisions in the complicated environment in which they operate.

During the second session titled, Libraries and Documentation, Allan Gilchrist, an information scientist from the UK, gave a presentation on a working model for metadata and terminology management.

Dr. Arwa Al Yasiri, a lecturer at Al Mansour University, Iraq, spoke about experimental building of automatic thesaurus by using data mining.

It was followed by a paper presented by Emad Abu Eid, library advisor in Dubai Municipality, who spoke about Dubai Municipality role in the construction of Arab Thesauri - expanded and archive thesaurus.

Risto Linturi, one of the world leading visionaries for Digital Cities and automated homes from Finland, gave his presentation on Digital City background and the COBA (Connected Open Building Automation) connection.

In his paper, Tony Caravella, Director of the State Records Office of Western Australia, spoke on the strict legal regulation of record keeping-Does it really support decision making.

In the third session of the day on Statistics and Information, Dr. Atef Khalifa, Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Demography at Cairo University gave the keynote address.

Dr. Hisham Makhloof, Dean of the Higher Institute of Specialized Technological Studies in the Ministry of Higher Education and Professor of Demographic Statistics in the Statistics Studies and Researches Institute at Cairo University, presented a paper on Demographic planning as a basis to continue the progress in achieving the developmental objective of the millennium.

It was followed by a presentation by Dr. Zain Al Wafai, Statistical and Demographic consultant at the Statistics Centre of Dubai Municipality, who spoke about Dubai Municipality's role in statistics as a central system for statistical information.

In his paper, Al Wafai examined the performance of exports in non-oil foreign exports of Dubai Emirate economy over the period 1998-2001 and the comparative advantage indices between exports sectors in Dubai.

During the fourth and concluding session of the first day of the conference, which was on Geographic Information System (GIS), Dr. Orhan Altan, Professor and head of the division of Photogrammetry at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, presented a paper titled, Monitoring of city development by means of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and GIS.

Dr. Bela Markus, Director of the College of Geoinformatics, University of West Hungary, spoke about spatial knowledge infrastructure. His paper dealt with the experiences of a European Union sponsored LEONARDO da VINCI project, Land Information Management for Executives, co-ordinated by the College of Geoinformatics, University of West Hungary.

The last presentation of the day was by Eng. Hussein AbdulMuttalib, GIS Engineer in Dubai Municipality, who spoke about Dubai Municipality role in environmental protection using remote sensing and GIS.