BYTE Middle East Announces Best of GITEX 96 Awards

New Arabic technologies garner most of the prizes.

Khaldoon Tabaza

DUBAI -- New Arabic technologies, including innovative Arabic/English translation products, were the stars of the show at GITEX 96 (The Gulf Information Technology Exhibition). More than 61,000 information technology business users attended this year, an 89 percent increase over last year, according to Nidal Abou Zaki of the Dubai World Trade Center. There were 400 exhibitors from 29 countries.

BYTE Middle East, the Arabic edition of BYTE magazine, recognized the best Arabic technologies and products with its Best of GITEX 96 awards. The top show award for Best Arabic Technolog y went to two products : the Arabic Automatic Diacritiser , from Sakhr Software (Cairo, Egypt; +202 274 9929; fax: +202 274 0044, http://www.sakhr.com ; sakhr@sakhr.rite.com), and the Transphere Multilingual Machine Translation System , from Applications Technologies (McLean, VA, U.S.; +1 703 821 5000; fax: +1 703 734 5703; myaghi @apptek.com).

Written Arabic contains diacritical marks, and the meaning of a word differs greatly according to its diacritics. Sakhr's product is the first Arabic automated diacritiser; it provides the needed infrastructure to build a powerful syntax/semantics analyzer, which is needed to produce an accurate Arabic/English, English/A rabic translation product. The Transphere Multilingual Machine utilizes the knowledge of modern computational linguistics theories to translate Arabic into English and vice versa.

The award for Best Innovative Arabic Technology went to Arabic Textware (Amman, Jordan; +9626 834606; fax: +9626 836735; arabtext@go.com.jo) for its Arabic Pen . This technology enables the recognition of Arabic cursive handwriting. The other winning technology is Arabic SX , from Arabic Digital Agencies (Yemen; +9671 267675; fax: +9671 267676; apple@y.net.ye). Arabic SX does phonetic searches of bilingual Arabic/English databases.

The Voice Compression Utility , from Research & Development International (Cairo, Egypt; +202 3499378; rdi@ritsec1.com.eg), received the Best International Arabic-Developed Technology award. Th is 1:50 voice-compression utility preserves voice quality and has been used to produce CDs that contain the full audio text of The Holy Quran.

Best Arabic Internet Technology prize went to Al Bahith , from Sakhr . This is the first morphology-based Arabic search engine for the Internet, where the amount of Arabic content is growing. Al Bahith enables the building of Internet and intranet search engines.

Sindbad , also from Sakhr Software , received the Best Arabic Internet Software award. This add-on lets different browsers, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer, handle browsing, e-mail, and chatting in Arabic, in addition to adding strong features such as spelling checking and dictionary-based translation of words in Web pages.

The Best Arabicized Internet Application was Arabic InterOffice , from Oracle Middle East (Dubai, U.A.E.; +9714 313828; fax: +9714 313258; hdajani@ae.oracle.com). It is currently the only Arabic application that enables smart corporate data management on the Internet.

There were two winners in the category of Best Native Arabic Software for Windows . The Dowlog Educational Software Series , from Dowlog Technology (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; +9661 4625566; fax: +9661 4623356; http://www.dowlog.com ), excels in presenting learning materials for young students. The other winner was Arabic for Non-Arabs , an instructional CD-ROM from Sakhr Software .

Best Native Macintosh Arabic Software was Alef , from Zeine Technological Applications (Amman, Jordan; +9626 618851; fax: +9626 618852; zeineops@go.com.jo). This is a powerful, easy-to-use native multilingual word processor with the ability to read the Arabic Windows text format. The other winner in this category, Oryx , from Linotype-Hell (Nicosia, Cyprus; +572 333842; fax: +572 333845), is the first world-class Arabic desktop publishing package to hit the market.

Best Arabicized Software awards were granted to Arabic Windows 95 and Arabic Office 95 , from Microsoft (Dubai, U.A.E.; +9714 513888; fax: +9714 527444, ahmedc@microsoft.com). Other products awarded in this category were OS/2 Warp for the Arabic User 4.0 , from IBM (Cairo, Egypt; +202 3492533; fax: +202 3601227; Direct@eg .ibm.com), and A rabic Corel Draw 6.0 , from Corel (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; +1 613 728 0826; fax: +1 613 7619179; 74143.3424@compuserve.com).

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Best Arabic Technology

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Products from Sakhr Software (top) and Applications Technologies shared the Best Arabic Technology award.