Digitisation of Cultural Heritage: between EU Priorities and Bulgarian Realities

* The part of this article presenting institutional involvement is an extended and updated version of the respective part of a report on Bulgaria prepared by Milena Dobreva for a MINERVAPlus Global Report (Coordinating digitisation in Europe. Progress report of the National Representatives Group: coordination mechanisms for digitisation policies and programmes 2004, forthcoming).

The Latest Prague Contributions to Written Cultural Heritage Processing

* The following text has been originally published in the Proceedings of the Language Recourses and Evaluation Conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, 2004, under the title of "Towards Intelligent Written Cultural Heritage Processing - Lexical processing". I present here a revised contribution of the aforementioned paper and I add here the latest efforts done in the Center for Computational Linguistic in Prague in the field under discussion.

Designing a Cultural Heritage Sector Broker Using SDBC

Among the actual cultural-heritage-related problems is the one of effectively managing and globally distributing digitized cultural (and scientific) information. The only feasible way to realize this goal is via the Internet. Hence, a significant issue to be considered is the adequate design of software applications which to realize brokerage tasks within the global space. However, due to the great complexity of this cultural-heritage- related task (compared to other brokerage tasks successfully realized by software systems), the usage of the existing popular modeling instrumentarium seems inadequate. Hence, in this paper, an approach is presented and it is briefly discussed how the approach could be useful for building cultural heritage sector brokers.

Maltese Experience with Digitizing Cultural Heritage

The article gives an account of the various microfilming initiatives taken in Malta during the last thirty years. Various archives have managed to microfilm their holdings under co-operation agreements with international societies, or manuscript libraries. The advent of digital technology is now posing new challenges and opportunities for the archives sector. The idea of a National Memory Project that will try to bridge the different approaches in the preservation of records in the various public, private, and ecclesiastical archives in Malta is discussed. Technical challenges are highlighted, as are the opportunities that arise from collaboration and active participation in international projects such as the European Visual Archives (EVA), and the SEEDI initiative.

Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: Innovative Applications of Automated Metadata Generation

Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: Innovative Applications of Automated Metadata Generation Edited by: Krassimira Ivanova, Milena Dobreva, Peter Stanchev, George Totkov Authors (in order of appearance): Krassimira Ivanova, Peter Stanchev, George Totkov, Kalina Sotirova, Juliana Peneva, Stanislav Ivanov, Rositza Doneva, Emil Hadjikolev, George Vragov, Elena Somova, Evgenia Velikova, Iliya Mitov, Koen Vanhoof, Benoit Depaire, Dimitar Blagoev Reviewer: Prof., Dr. Avram Eskenazi Published by: Plovdiv University Publishing House "Paisii Hilendarski" ISBN: 978-954-423-722-6 2012, Plovdiv, Bulgaria First Edition

Acoustic Riddles of Cultural Heritage

It is shown, that in the process of evolution, a relationship between some hidden parameters of acoustic signals and expected emotional response to them has been formed. This relationship is a necessary condition for a living creature to survive. The efficiency of the concept represented is illustrated using examples from the field of classical music, ethnic African music, as well as biolinguistic signals of animals. Reasons of a particular impact of bell rings are analyzed using acoustic signals of some Bulgarian and Russian bell rings and chimes.

Applying Associative Classifier PGN for Digitised Cultural Heritage Resource Discovery

Resource discovery is one of the key services in digitised cultural heritage collections. It requires intelligent mining in heterogeneous digital content as well as capabilities in large scale performance; this explains the recent advances in classification methods. Associative classifiers are convenient data mining tools used in the field of cultural heritage, by applying their possibilities to taking into account the specific combinations of the attribute values. Usually, the associative classifiers prioritize the support over the confidence. The proposed classifier PGN questions this common approach and focuses on confidence first by retaining only 100% confidence rules. The classification tasks in the field of cultural heritage usually deal with data sets with many class labels. This variety is caused by the richness of accumulated culture during the centuries. Comparisons of classifier PGN with other classifiers, such as OneR, JRip and J48, show the competitiveness of PGN in recognizing multi-class datasets on collections of masterpieces from different West and East European Fine Art authors and movements.

Language Resources – a Part of World Cultural Heritage

This article briefly reviews multilingual language resources for Bulgarian, developed in the frame of some international projects: the first-ever annotated Bulgarian MTE digital lexical resources, Bulgarian-Polish corpus, Bulgarian-Slovak parallel and aligned corpus, and Bulgarian-Polish-Lithuanian corpus. These resources are valuable multilingual dataset for language engineering research and development for Bulgarian language. The multilingual corpora are large repositories of language data with an important role in preserving and supporting the world's cultural heritage, because the natural language is an outstanding part of the human cultural values and collective memory, and a bridge between cultures.

Digital Libraries and Portals Saving National Cultural Heritage (IMI–BAS Experience)

The current research activities of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI—BAS) include the study and application of knowledge-based methods for the creation, integration and development of multimedia digital libraries with applications in cultural heritage. This report presents IMI-BAS’s developments at the digital library management systems and portals, i.e. the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, the Bulgarian Folklore Digital Library and the Bulgarian Folklore Artery, etc. developed during the several national and international projects: - "Digital Libraries with Multimedia Content and its Application in Bulgarian Cultural Heritage" (contract 8/21.07.2005 between the IMI–BAS, and the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications; - FP6/IST/P-027451 PROJECT LOGOS "Knowledge-on-Demand for Ubiquitous Learning", EU FP6, IST, Priority 2.4.13 "Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an Enlarged Europe" - NSF project D-002-189 SINUS "Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning". - NSF project IO-03-03/2006 ―Development of Digital Libraries and Information Portal with Virtual Exposition "Bulgarian Folklore Heritage". The presented prototypes aims to provide flexible and effective access to the multimedia presentation of the cultural heritage artefacts and collections, maintaining different forms and format of the digitized information content and rich functionality for interaction. The developments are a result of long- standing interests and work in the technological developments in information systems, knowledge processing and content management systems. The current research activities aims at creating innovative solutions for assembling multimedia digital libraries for collaborative use in specific cultural heritage context, maintaining their semantic interoperability and creating new services for dynamic aggregation of their resources, access improvement, personification, intelligent curation of content, and content protection. The investigations are directed towards the development of distributed tools for aggregating heterogeneous content and ensuring semantic compatibility with the European digital library EUROPEANA, thus providing possibilities for pan- European access to rich digitalised collections of Bulgarian cultural heritage.

Personal Work Space and Content Analysis Functionality in a Cultural Heritage Digital Library

The paper presents a different vision for personalization of the user’s stay in a cultural heritage digital library that models services for personalized content marking, commenting and analyzing that doesn’t require strict user profile, but aims at adjusting the user’s individual needs. The solution is borrowed from real work and studying of traditional written content sources (incl. books, manuals), where the user mainly performs activities such as underlining the important parts of the content, writing notes and inferences, selecting and marking zones of their interest in pictures, etc. In the paper a special attention is paid to the ability to execute learning analysis allowing different ways for the user to experience the digital library content with more creative settings.

Discover the Thracians - An Approach for Use of 2D and 3D Technologies for Digitization of Cultural Heritage in the Field of E-learning

Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer an easier access to and a multi-perspective view of cultural heritage artifacts and may also enrich and improve cultural heritage education through the adoption of innovative learning/teaching methods. This paper examines the different practices and opportunities for digitization of cultural artifacts with historical significance and describes the work on a pilot project concerning the development of e-learning materials in the Thracian cultural and historical heritage. The proposed method presents an approach based on a combination of 2D and 3D technologies to facilitate the overall process of digitization of individual objects. This approach not only provides greater opportunities for presenting the Thracian heritage but also new perspectives for studying it - students, scientists, PhD students will have the opportunity to work with the materials without having access to them.

NBU Digital Collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials”

Our experience in maintaining digital collections is described, which urged us to go deep in the process and build centralized digitalization policy. It instigated developing new strategy, adopting new technological solutions and staff training. The emphasis falls is placed on our digital collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials” as an example of a focused digitization at the New Bulgarian University (NBU) Library and our answer to modern trends in launching digital collections. Our future digitization plans are also discussed.

3D Laser Scanning for Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Cultural Heritage Main scanned objects - Four Temples of Different Religions in Sofia

The project demonstrates the use of modern technologies for preservation and presentation of the cultural and historical heritage. The idea is a database of cultural and historical heritage sites to be created applying three dimensional laser scanning technology and a combination of geodetic and photogrammetric methods and shooting techniques. For the purposes of carrying out this project, we have focused on some heritage sites in the central part of Sofia. We decided to include these particular buildings because of the fact that there is hardly another city in the world where within a radius of 400 m are located four temples of different religions - Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic. In the recent years, preservation of cultural heritage has been increasingly linked to objectives of sustainable development. Today, it has become clear that cultural heritage is also an economic resource that should be used for further economic development (through compulsory preservation of its authentic cultural values). There has been a more active public debate on the role of cultural heritage, regarding the following topics: improving the quality of life through development of cultural tourism, leading to an increase of the employment rate, constantly improving the business climate, etc. Cultural heritage preservation is becoming one of the priority objectives of the urban development policy. The focus has been shifted to new ways of preservation, mainly combinations of sophisticated technological solutions and their application for the purposes of preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage.

Cultural Heritage Archives on Bulgarian National Radio Platforms

The article describes radio archives as cultural heritage and presents their practical use as integrated resources on different radio platforms. The current situation and plans for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) for preserving and using these repositories are discussed.

Linguistic Corpora as International Cultural Heritage: The Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

The paper relates about our ongoing work on the creation of a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts. We discuss some differences in the approaches and the interpretation of some concepts, as well as various problems associated with the construction of our corpus, in particular the occasional ‘nonparallelism’ of original and translated texts. We give examples of the application of the parallel corpus for the study of lexical semantics and note the outstanding role of the corpus in the lexicographic description of Ukrainian and Bulgarian translation equivalents. We draw attention to the importance of creating parallel corpora as objects of national as well as global cultural heritage.