The third eLearning Africa conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training ended successfully on Friday, May 30th, 2008. The huge number of participants from African countries shows the vital interest in eLearning on the Continent and substantiates the conference as a truly African event. Projects and initiatives from all over Africa were presented. As contribution, we presented the project "Platform of tools  in Open-Source for Higher Education" funded by Canada's International Development Research Center (IDRC) through Connectivity Africa program. [presentation]

Ancient Document Workshop: Annaba 12-13th April 2008: The Ancient documents represent an invaluable wealth. The preservation of this heritage which suffers from cruelty of time and human misadventure in addition to the usual difficulties of quality degradation and fragility call out both scientists and policies to save the content of the endangered government archives.  In this context the LRI-Annaba will organise the 12 and 13^th april, with the SAPCCA project partners and invited speakers, a meeting about the processing of ?Ancient Arabic documents?.  This meeting is open to all researchers working on this subject, including social and library sciences. [Français]  []

If Knowledge management is the answer, what is the question ?
 Knowledge management refers to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence against discontinuous environmental change. Essentially it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings," says Dr. Yogesh Malhotra, widely recognized as a knowledge management pioneer.

Our applications developped for industrial firm, particularly Sonatrach, is how to manage knowledge for concrete cases of maintenance.
In this sense, we focus on the practical application of gas turbine and compressor with development of significatives ontologies. The work focus on  ontological engineering and more particularly the use of ontologies in the Knowledge-based systems. . (Contact us for more details or published papers).

A Grid Based Environment for sharing knowledge :
The efficient use of distributed resources is of paramount importance in order to enables infrastructures to be more versatile, expandable and scalable. The information shared structure of the World Wide Web, already imposed itself as relatively efficient structure for information sharing. However, the paradigm is shifting to a resource sharing infrastructure, mostly computational resource sharing, (i.e., the Grid technology) boosting the development of a new generation of online services. The objectives of our research team are to combine web services and Grid technology, not only for resource sharing, but for information sharing within a collaborative environment proposing a grid based architecture in order to maximize researcher's training for SARIMA (a research project in Mathematics and Computer Science in Africa, supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and other North-African projects.  (click and access to paper repository)

Forecasting Electricity Load in an Algerian Deregulated Market  :
The electric power industry is moving from a centralized operational approach to a competitive one. The understanding of electric power supply as a public service is being replaced by the notion that a competitive market is a more appropriate mechanism to supply energy to consumers with high reliability and low cost. In such competitive environments, data analysis, day type identification and prediction become powerful tools in the research of higher performances. Indeed, because electrical energy cannot be stored, there exists the unique physical requirement that supply equal demand instantaneously. A valid model (or forecasting tool) for load and/or consumption forecasting, will help to reach this requirement. A research project is ongoing focussing on date type identification regional and national as well as different forecasting techniques. The dependencies and/or correlation with external inputs such as temperature and humidity will be introduced along with project life time. As future research topic, prices forecast and the different techniques that may be used for the Algerian case must be addressed eventually. ++ Read for more details.