Natural Language Processing, Lexical Semantic, Ontology Engineering, Semantic Web, Data Engineering

Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Arabic Technologies”, in short “Sina Institute”, is a newly established research institute at Birzeit University, Palestine. It aims not only to advance the Palestinian society with innovative solutions, but also to contribute to the world knowledge with state-of-art research. The institute’s long term strategy is to be a world-class center of excellence in Arabic Knowledge Engineering. The institute consists currently of two research groups: OnToGroup, and ALTIR Group. The OnToGroup (lead by Mustafa Jarrar, Associate Professor) focuses on Arabic Lexical Semantics, Ontology Engineering, Knowledge Management, Database and Semantic Web. The ALTIR group (lead by Adnan Yahya, Full professor) focuses on Arabic Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and localized IT solutions for people with disabilities.Although the institute is newly established, it is the largest research center in ICT in Palestine and among a few centers in the region specialized in Arabic Technologies. The institute has been awarded a grant from Google Int. for its research excellency in Arabic search engines and tools. It is also the coordinator and grant holder of the EU TEMPUS grant, (PalGov Project) to establish the Palestinian e-Government Academy (www.egovacademy.ps). It has recently been awarded an FP7 grant (SIERA project) as a coordinator and grant holder, in the area of multilingual and multicultural knowledge sharing. See several other ongoing projectshttp://sina.birzeit.edu