In 2011, the people of Tunisia managed to provide the spark that would bring the Arab Spring to life. In light of the changes that happened since then, it has become crucial that the people of the Arab world understand their ability to scrutinize the politics of their country. As such we have been honored with providing the Tunisian people with Mejlis.
Powered by the government and sustained by volunteers, Mejlis provides the citizens of Tunisia with the tools that allow them to followup on all the action happening within the walls Parliament, providing its visitors with info on the members of the parliament and their parties, videos of sessions, updates on legislations being discussed, and much more. In essence, the site is there to provide an important reminder: governments are meant to serve, first and foremost, their citizens.
Good news seems to be all around these days and we are crowing ours with a new, powerful technology achievement by eSpace; akhbarak.net's auto-tagger. In order for people to make the most of the content of any site, tags are a very crucial instrument, helping people locate objects of interest quickly and efficiently through carefully chosen keywords. Akhbarak, as a content aggregator, collects thousands of articles from across various Internet media sources every single day, and it would be almost impossible for each post to be thoroughly read and tagged manually. As such, eSpace has developed the auto-tagger, an intelligent tool that "reads" the text of the articles, cross-references the content with Wikipedia entries, and locates viable tags and puts them in place. Though the idea of the auto-tagger has been talked about theoretically before, Akhbarak's is considered to be one of the pioneering applications of it.
eSpace's Ahmed Bakr has given the company the chance to be represented in Japan once more, years after our participation in RubyKaigi 2009. Along with two fellow researchers, Bakr's paper on Efficient Incremental Phrase-Based Document Clustering will be taking part in the 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition, which will be held at the Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. Bakr's paper, which covers clustering technology that has been very useful in grouping related news items in eSpace's very own akhbarak.net, will be participating on the 12th of November, the first day of the technical track of the conference. This is a definite privilege for our team and we wish Bakr the best of luck. To read the abstract of Bakr et al.'s paper, you can find it here. (https://iapr.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/abstract.pl?ConfID=7&Number=261)
OilWell7.com, developed by eSpace, is a useful tool for our times. Established with the belief that while oil resources will eventually deplete, human resources will not, OilWell7 aims to tap into the human resources of the Saudi people as well as those who have a resident visa. It provides a venue for companies to post available positions in their institutes and for those in the country's work force to perform a thorough job search for posts in various fields, also posting their C.V.s online so as to be available for the companies hunting for human potential. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; OilWell7's strong point is that its system matches the applications to the appropriate job posts, allowing businesses and potential employees to find each other in a much easier fashion.
eSpace has wrapped up work on duplays.com, the Dubai based site dedicated to all forms of sports in the city and that is beginning to tentatively service Abu Dhabi and Gurgaon. Servicing more than 35,000 users, DUPLAYS keeps them up-to-date on the leagues and events connected to over 21 sports, ranging from golf, to soccer, to cricket, to even frisbee! The users can navigate through the sports, see the dates and durations of events, filter through the results according to gender and skill level, sign up and pay for the events, and more importantly can get in contact with other sports enthusiasts like themselves.