Background / Historic
Fig. 1: Sakia - Search the World IRRIGATION Index as of 22 February 1999
Historic links and information
Services at the University of Kassel
Sakia.org was established in 1997 at the Department of Rural Engineering and Natural Resource Protection at the University of Kassel, Germany. The department was headed by Prof. Dr Peter Wolff.
Sakia.org comprised a loosely coupled set of technical services in the broader area of land and water, including irrigation, hydrology, Kulturtechnik, and agro-climatic data. Some services, such as IRRIGATION-L, date back to 1994. IRRIGATION-L was established with technical support and cooperation from the DFN (Deutsches Forschungsnetz), the German National Research and Education Network, which generously provided the infrastructure by maintaining the list server.
One of the key objectives was to provide services and freely accessible knowledge to students as well as the wider technical community.
Fig. 2: Sakia - Start page as of 22 September 2015
Dedicated Sakia.org server and services
Following university restructuring and the retirement of Prof. Dr Peter Wolff — which led to the closure of the department—a new solution was required to continue the services.
As site usage and public demand remained strong, a decision was made to modernise and re-establish Sakia.org, potentially outside the university framework. As an interim measure, services continued to be physically hosted at the university under the umbrella of a neighbouring department.
Preparations began in 2001, and a dedicated Sakia.org service running on a stand-alone server was launched in early 2003.
This second iteration of Sakia.org consisted of multiple websites and services managed jointly under the Sakia.org umbrella. Four core services were accessible directly via their own domains, and three via service-specific subdomains.
While the site underwent continuous development, the core components remained:
- Sakia.org
- IRRIGATION-L
- Virtual Library Irrigation
- IRRISOFT
- Sakia.org e-Publish
- e-Journal of Land and Water
- Journal of Applied Irrigation Science
- Sakia.org News
Content volume and activity peaked in 2015.
Server failure and financial constraints
Following a server failure in late 2015, the entire site had to be taken offline. Although a skeleton site was established in 2016, the services could not be restored to their former scope.
The primary reasons were financial rather than technical, compounded by severe time constraints. Despite sustained demand and steady growth prior to the collapse, the lack of sufficient long-term funding had become critical well before the final failure.
Consequently, activities were progressively scaled back, and content generation and acquisition ultimately ceased altogether.
Some content remains accessible via archived captures in the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive. However, this archived material represents only a fraction of the original content published prior to the crash in October 2015. The original site architecture and navigation (including extensive use of frames) significantly hindered complete capture by Internet Archive crawlers.
The last largely complete (1) version (October 2015) is available at:
(1) Note: The original site structure limited comprehensive archival capture by automated crawlers.
Sakia.org content structure
A more detailed overview is provided in the sitemap below.
Fig. 3: Sakia.org – Sitemap as of 12 June 2007