Museum Collections and the Semantic Web

The paper discusses some current trends in the area of development and use of semantic portals for accessing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. The presentation is focused on some issues concerning metadata standards for museums, museum collections ontologies and semantic search engines. A number of design considerations and recommendations are formulated.

Supporting and Enhancing Research on Cultural Heritage in France: the PATRIMA Project

In this paper, we first overview the French project on heritage called PATRIMA, launched in 2011 as one of the Projets d'investissement pour l'avenir, a French funding program meant to last for the next ten years. The overall purpose of the PATRIMA project is to promote and fund research on various aspects of heritage presentation and preservation. Such research being interdisciplinary, research groups in history, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science are involved in this project. The PATRIMA consortium involves research groups from universities and from the main museums or cultural heritage institutions in Paris and surroundings. More specifically, the main members of the consortium are the two universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Versailles Saint-Quentin and the following famous museums or cultural institutions: Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Rodin. In the second part of the paper, we focus on two projects funded by PATRIMA named EDOP and Parcours and dealing with data integration. The goal of the EDOP project is to provide users with a data space for the integration of heterogeneous information about heritage; Linked Open Data are considered for an effective access to the corresponding data sources. On the other hand, the Parcours project aims at building an ontology on the terminology about the techniques dealing with restoration and/or conservation. Such an ontology is meant to provide a common terminology to researchers using different databases and different vocabularies.

PanamaTipico.com: a Born Digital Initiative for Researching and Preserving Panama’s Cultural Heritage

This paper reflects on the experience of PanamaTipico.com, an independent website specialized in the research and preservation of the cultural heritage of the Republic of Panama, a developing country located in Central America. Basic information about the project is described. Also discussed, are some of the challenges confronted by the project and the results achieved. The goal of this paper is to encourage a discussion on whether or not the experience of Pan-amaTipico.com is comparable to the experiences of similar projects in developing countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Sturm Sequences and Modified Subresultant Polynomial Remainder Sequences

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): F.2.1, G.1.5, I.1.2.

A New Characterization of Weighted Peetre K-Functionals (II)

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 46B70, 41A25, 41A17, 26D10. ∗Part of the results were reported at the Conference “Pioneers of Bulgarian Mathematics”, Sofia, 2006.

Hausdorff Distances for Searching in Binary Text Images

This work has been partially supported by Grant No. DO 02-275, 16.12.2008, Bulgarian NSF, Ministry of Education and Science.

A Multicriteria Decision Support System MultiDecision-1

* This paper is partially supported by the National Science Fund of Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science under contract № I–1401\2004 "Interactive Algorithms and Software Systems Supporting Multicriteria Decision Making."

An Electromagnetism Metaheuristic for the Uncapacitated Multiple Allocation Hub Location Problem

In this article, the results achieved by applying an electromagnetism (EM) inspired metaheuristic to the uncapacitated multiple allocation hub location problem (UMAHLP) are discussed. An appropriate objective function which natively conform with the problem, 1-swap local search and scaling technique conduce to good overall performance.Computational tests demonstrate the reliability of this method, since the EM-inspired metaheuristic reaches all optimal/best known solutions for UMAHLP, except one, in a reasonable time.

Adaptive Document Image Binarization with Application in Processing Astronomical Logbooks

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): I.7, I.7.5.

A Mixed Integer Quadratic Programming Model for the Low Autocorrelation Binary Sequence Problem

In this paper the low autocorrelation binary sequence problem (LABSP) is modeled as a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem and proof of the model’s validity is given. Since the MIQP model is semidefinite, general optimization solvers can be used, and converge in a finite number of iterations. The experimental results show that IQP solvers, based on this MIQP formulation, are capable of optimally solving general/skew-symmetric LABSP instances of up to 30/51 elements in a moderate time. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): G.1.6, I.2.8.

Digital Libraries as a Social Media

This paper presents an innovative approach for enhancing digital libraries functionalities. An innovative distributed architecture involving digital libraries for effective and efficient knowledge sharing was developed. In the frame of this architecture semantic services were implemented, offering multi language and multi culture support, adaptability and knowledge resources recommendation, based on the use of ontologies, metadata and user modeling. New methods for teacher education using digital libraries and knowledge sharing were developed. These new methods were successfully applied in more than 15 pilot experiments in seven European countries, with more than 3000 teachers trained.

Preserving Linked Data

PRELIDA (PREserving LInked DAta) is an FP7 Coordination Action funded by the European Commission under the Digital Preservation Theme. PRELIDA targets the particular stakeholders of the Linked Data community, including data providers, service providers, technology providers and end user communities. These stakeholders have not been traditionally targeted by the Digital Preservation community, and are typically not aware of the digital preservation solutions already available. So an important task of PRELIDA is to raise awareness of existing preservation solutions and to facilitate their uptake. At the same time, the Linked Data cloud has specific characteristics in terms of structuring, interlinkage, dynamicity and distribution that pose new challenges to the preservation community. PRELIDA organises in-depth discussions among the two communities to identify which of these characteristics require novel solutions, and to develop road maps for addressing the new challenges. PRELIDA will complete its lifecycle at the end of this year, and the talk will report about the major findings.

Aggregating Local Descriptors for Epigraphs Recognition

In this paper, we consider the task of recognizing epigraphs in images such as photos taken using mobile devices. Given a set of 17,155 photos related to 14,560 epigraphs, we used a k-NearestNeighbor approach in order to perform the recognition. The contribution of this work is in evaluating state-of-the-art visual object recognition techniques in this specific context. The experimental results conducted show that Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors obtained aggregating SIFT descriptors is the best choice for this task.

Recent Developments in Digital Mathematics Libraries

The paper presents recent developments in the domain of digital mathematics libraries towards the envisioned 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics. The Bulgarian Digital Mathematical Library BulDML and the Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML-CZ are founding partners of the EuDML Initiative and through it contribute to the sustainable development of the European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML and to the global advancements in this area.

Decomposition of Banach Space into a Direct Sum of Separable and Reflexive Subspaces and Borel Maps

* This paper was supported in part by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, Science and Technologies under contract MM-506/95.