Behind the strategy of achieving a Digital Government

Building a Digital Government is one of the key pillars in Singapore’s Smart Nation transformation. Amid the frenzy in rapid digitalisation, the pillar is a commitment to the vision of a achieving a government that is Digital to the Core, and Serves with the Heart. This dual agenda advocates end-to-end digitalisation of every agency as a means to enhance the government’s service towards citizens and businesses. Instead of viewing digitalisation as an end goal, the main purpose of designing a Digital Government is in the people. With the same noble vision of embracing a new digital culture to better serve its society, custodian of Singapore’s heritage, National Heritage Board (NHB), joined hands with Artificial Intelligence (AI) vendor, TAIGER.

Roots.gov.sg, where tech and art meet

With art interestingly conceptualised as our universal language, technology has immense potential in reshaping the art landscape and impacting the lives of many. The project between NHB and TAIGER explored this very notion with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate a more convenient and enriching way to explore local heritage. This was done through a relaunch of NHB’s digital platform, roots.gov.sg.

Roots is a one-stop online destination for anyone to discover Singapore’s diverse culture and history governed by NHB. The platform recognised the need to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to bring its diversified historical relics and materials to consumers in a modern way. Yet, beyond taking these symbolic ancient artefacts online, the platform was strategically designed to be highly inclusive by strengthening digital access. Roots was cleverly enhanced with TAIGER’s AI-powered technologies such as semantic search capabilities and a personalisation engine to make content discovery easier for every visitor.

Empowering both visitors and administrators with automated artefact organisation and access

Roots was built with TAIGER’s Omnitive Search, a semantic search engine for digitalised organisations to find meaningful answers in expanding digital environments. This was ideal for Roots which wanted to digitalise their massive amounts of content and ensure visitors could gain access to these information easily. For administrators, Omnitive Search’s auto-tagging capabilities allowed for precise and automatic organisation of existing and new pieces of content which was a common situation for Roots. This move sets a precedent for world class knowledge management in the arts and cultural sector.

“Manually organising 100,000 content pieces would have taken Roots one year to complete, but AI enabled them to do so just within a week.”

– Channel 8’s Technology Makes It Easy: A Digital Journey To Find Roots.

 

Unlocking better content discovery to enable a better visitor experience

Auto-tagging forms the foundation of our search and recommendation engine to deliver an improved user experience with faster search and quality recommendations, facilitating content discovery when visitors browse through the website.

Watch the feature on national television

See Omnitive Search in action in the Channel 8 broadcast – Technology Makes It Easy: A Digital Journey to Find Roots.