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Published on February 26, 2008

The project is aimed at developing the national digital content, which can be used to improve knowledge, preserve culture or even make new business developments.

Nectec's director Pansak Siriruchatapong said Nectec would act as a centre to encourage every part of the society to collect content in digital format to allow other people to access it through the network at any time from anywhere. The centre, meanwhile, will establish interoperability standards as well as develop tools to help people more easily convert their content into digital format. This will facilitate information exchange across the network. 

In this project, Nectec will use its research and development work, especially in human-language technology, in integration to support the whole project. Web crawlers, for example, will be used to collect data while smart search engines will bring information scattered in many places to users as required. Knowledge engineering technology also plays an important part in building, maintaining and developing knowledge-based systems.

Pansak said that this year, the centre would begin the first three pilot projects to be a model for Digitised Thailand.

The first project is to work with Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna to convert Lanna language, culture and ways of life into digital and animation formats.

Meanwhile, the centre plans to work with the Buddhadasa Foundation to digitise the teachings of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and develop an electronic museum.

Pansak said the last project would be done with Klaikangwon School to help the school keep video broadcasts of educational content in a digital archive to allow students and others to access it through the network under the concept of electronic learning.

"We will start Digitised Thailand from these three projects to be a model for other organisations to follow. If everyone helps to convert content into digital format, we will have a huge digital database that allows people at all levels to get access to enormous amounts of knowledge through the network," he said.

In addition, Pansak also eyed business benefits that would emerge from this project. He said once the country had a huge amount of digital data provided for free, businesses could develop the content  for future information services.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation