“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 excellen
ce 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 built on previous work of the researchers and has several ongoing projects. Sina Institute is the largest research center in ICT in Palestine and among a few centers in the region specialized in Arabic Technologies.
