About

ASKIP — African Sovereign Knowledge Infrastructure Program — is an autonomous infrastructure designed to turn thousands of scientific and institutional documents into structured, queryable and usable knowledge.

It collects, extracts, normalises and links knowledge scattered across the scientific and institutional literature, in order to build an African knowledge infrastructure usable by researchers, public institutions and artificial intelligence systems.

ASKIP begins with health, with the ambition of gradually extending this architecture to other strategic domains of knowledge.

A large part of the knowledge produced about Africa exists in fragmented form: scientific articles, institutional reports, university repositories, document databases and scattered archives.

ASKIP turns that fragmented information into infrastructure.

The aim is not simply to gather more documents, but to allow the knowledge they contain to be found, linked, queried, compared and reused.

ASKIP builds a chain from the document to structured knowledge:

Documents→Extraction→Entities & concepts→Relations→Provenance→Knowledge Graph→Applications

Every piece of structured knowledge keeps a link to its source, so that the user can trace the information presented back to the document it comes from.

The Knowledge Graph then makes it possible to gradually connect diseases, countries, researchers, institutions, publications, observations and other scientific entities within a single infrastructure.

ASKIP is built around a simple principle: knowledge about Africa must be able to be structured, linked and mobilised as a strategic infrastructure.

Such an infrastructure can support scientific research, by making existing knowledge easier to discover and connect; public policy, by giving access to structured and traceable knowledge; and African artificial intelligence, by creating knowledge bases usable by future AI systems.

ASKIP does not seek to become one more library. A library keeps documents. ASKIP seeks to represent what they contain, and the relations between those pieces of knowledge.

As new publications, institutions, researchers and datasets join the infrastructure, the graph can grow richer and bring out new connections between African knowledge.