Information Society Watch
A Southern Lens on the Information SocietyInnovative ICT tools for information provisioning via agricultural extensions
2006, Indian Institute of Information Technology
This note showcases the ICT project called aAQUA. aAQUA is an online multilingual, multimedia agricultural portal for disseminating information from and to the grassroots of the Indian agricultural community. aAQUA simultaneously addresses two major challenges in farmer outreach programmes - geographic reach and customised delivery, by using novel database systems and information retrieval techniques like intelligent caching, offline access with intermittent synchronisation, semantic-based search, etc. aAQUA's large scale deployment provides avenues for researchers to contribute in the areas of knowledge management, cross-lingual information retrieval, and providing accessible content for rural populations. Apart from agriculture, aAQUA can be configured and customized for expert advice over mobile networks and the Internet in education, healthcare and other domains of interest to a developing population (Adapted from author).