The role of national internet resources development, its advantages and difficulties
This article is about today’s state of Kazakh Internet. It analysis the current role of national internet resources, its challenges, advantages and difficulties specific for our country. In addition, it represents a development of web-application in Kazakh language, its role in national internet resources and its difficulties and approaches to solve them. The web-application objectives are developing an online encyclopedia as web-application, analyzing its achievement, evaluating and investigating its difficulties facilitating to find out users needs and providing its resources.
Introduction
Internet technology is one of the technologies for human beings that give more benefits than its expectation. It has been developing gradually in recent years that, no one can imagine current world without Internet. It is also one of core technologies of, others like computer technology, in Information age. Nowadays, Internet technology is everywhere from ordering queue in barber to space communication. In society, the role of internet resources is growing in parallel with its technology development.
Today, in spite of researches, governmental support to improve internet technologies, resources and its role in our country, one of facing problem in the development is inefficient internet resources, especially in Kazakh language. The users speaking in Kazakh language are not taking materials or information from internet what they want. The well-known search engines that national internet customers use, such as www.mail.ru, www.yandex.ru, www.google.kz etc, will present the result to user in Kazakh language according to text availability in source. Often it does not provide prioritized result what users want.
The Problem
The Republic of Kazakhstan is ranked as 9th largest country on earth by territory. But the population is positioned at 62 places. The usage of internet technology that has rich function to communicate through country is very useful and practical according to ratio of population position to territory. Despite adequate support from government, the development rate of internet technologies and national internet resources are not in good quality. There are several reasons, such as less Kazakh language speaking pool, the expensive internet connection rate comparing to some neighbor countries, expensive database and internet technologies etc, playing barrier character to cause negative to the development in this direction. In addition, web sites based on Russian language registered as .kz domains contain more percentage than those that based on Kazakh language. Even web-sites support both language includes more Russian language based materials than Kazakh language.
Currently, there are several web portals, web applications and web sites built for specific type of people groups to communicate each other and share their information among them. Unfortunately, there are almost all in Russian language.
Kazakhstan’s popular web-portal Site.kz counts 4624 web-sites. Almost all of them in Russian language. The most popular Kazakh web-portal Massagan.com counts 664 web-sites, not all of them in Kazakh language.
These numbers are too small, and it shows the sad state of Kazakh Internet. In the times of click and click or dot com era we are still in the phase of static web-pages with minimum content.
In Kazakhstan, according to the statistics, only about 30% of the total number of computer owners use the Internet at home, and 70% are working in online classes, Internet cafe, in the workplace. And, of course, when using Internet resources, not everyone is satisfied with the outcome and the quality of search results. Why? Many may not realize hypertext search because of the multiplicity of sites, because of frequently recurring sites. Also, users sometimes receive an unpredictable response to your request. Do not like the loss of time and money for ineffective use of the Internet.
Based on the above data, we can conclude that today the Internet in Kazakhstan is not sufficiently developed and demand. Even the so-called maximum audience that at least once in his life seen a live Internet is a fraction of the population of Kazakhstan. What is the cause of this situation? Most likely, the fact that we did not quite understand why the Internet in general need. Why do I need a cell phone, it is clear to all, as evidenced by the rapid growth of cellular telephony. To date, the number of holders of the prestigious toys exceeded 200 thousand, and, besides, the pleasure is not cheap, and cell phones came with us later on the Internet. So it is not the high price of access (although the reason given most often) is the main obstacle to the spread of the Internet. What causes such a situation?
– The first is the lack of attention of our secondary and higher education institutions to the use of the Internet in the learning process. Internet in the United States has two parents – the military-industrial complex and the university network. Here, only a few of our universities and academies have their own second-level domain;
– Kazakhstan’s Internet is not yet sufficiently saturated with information, like news and background and therefore does not fulfill its main function – the most rapid mass media;
– Due to underdevelopment of tourism within the country (it is known that 95% of Kazakhstan’s tourist organizations aimed at export) there is no need to create professional sites that tell about Kazakhstan on a high level;
– Trade and services through the Internet has for us no more exotic than that due to steady population distrust all kinds of non-cash transactions;
– The level of demand for the Internet depends on the state of industry, education, science, culture, all branches of our lives. The sooner the country will develop, the more it will need the Internet. Have the opposite effect – the faster developing high-tech information, the faster growing economy, politics, science and culture. If the revival of industry – the day tomorrow, then education, science – the most that on there today. In fact, today in Kazakhstan, with the hyper-abundance of higher education and various training courses under the most optimistic estimates one Internet-connected computer accounted for 800 people. In the United States for 5, in Germany for 8, in Russia for 100.
All these indicators show a poor knowledge and low work experience in a virtual environment.
There are no online encyclopedias with rich resources in Kazakh language that can give valuable information to everyone from school student to adult pensioner. The encyclopedias known worldwide, like www.wikipedia.org contain less internet supplies in Kazakh language [5499 materials on the date when this article is written] and they are not specific for Kazakh users. In addition, those encyclopedias seem more difficult to manage and add their resources that they want and know. The current situation of Kazakh internet users is quite different from others that there are large amount of user groups in China that use Arabic scripts, in Uzbekistan that use Latin scripts and other scripts who are ethnic Kazakh living outside of Republic of Kazakhstan, but use separate internet resources in spite of one mother tongue.
The encyclopedia
The role of online encyclopedia is very special to take satisfactory information from web. The audience of online encyclopedia is quite wider than other web resources. It should be able to provide all needed information for all ages.
In order to facilitate those difficulties for users and to add our effort in the development of national internet resources, development of online encyclopedia serves for national internet users to receive adequate materials and to add their own materials that they have or to write it online that they know.
In practice, there are several online encyclopedias that make available resources for Kazakh users. Currently existing online encyclopedias are successful to find out common materials, but they are less effective to analyze and detect specific topics.
In addition, it is also widespread problem in online encyclopedia, especially in search keywords that users can discover according to text availability, but they are less useful to prioritize result. Thus, outcome of return consequence in query reduce the usefulness of online encyclopedia. Furthermore, it is also one of facing problem in online encyclopedia.
We set as problem statement that how to build online encyclopedia to provide rich materials for everyone in society who has internet access from school students to old people, to be specific for Kazakh users and Kazakh mentality, attitude and feeling and to keep it simple to find out what they desire and add their efforts to fill out the resource pool to help others.
It is expected that implementation of any project that deal with a company operating in the development, maintenance and promotion of Internet projects of domestic production, aimed at creating and developing the national information infrastructure of the Republic of Kazakhstan and increase the population of a culture use of the Internet. Developing a Kazakh Internet would be a step in the formation of quality information space, promotion of Internet users in the Kazakh segment of the public to modern information space, filled with the Kazakh content.
REFERENCES
[1] Консультации.Анализ Интернет-аудитории Казахстана. КОМКОН-2 Евразияhttp://www.comcon-2.kz/consultation/konsl_000014.php