Preserving Cultural Heritage Using Open Source Collection Management Tools

Open source software (OSS) popularity is growing steadily and many OSS systems could be used to preserve cultural heritage objects. Such solutions give the opportunity to organizations to afford the development of a digital collection. This paper focuses on reviewing two OSS tools, CollectionSpace and the Open Video Digital Library Toolkit and discuss on how these could be used for organizing digital replicas of cultural objects. The features of the software are presented and some examples are given.

Recovering Valuable Artifacts of the Cultural Heritage through Modern Technology and Equipment

This paper presents the digital reconstruction of the carving of the iconostasis of the Assumption church in the town of Bansko in its original form, a research project of the Department of Mathematical Linguistics of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

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.

ASPICO: Advanced Scientific Portal for International Cooperation on Digital Cultural Conten

* This research is partially supported by a grant (bourse Lavoisier) from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Affaires Etrangères).

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.

Digital Preservation and Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage: Presentation of the KT-DigiCult-BG Project

The fast development and wide application of digital methods, combined with broadened access to the Internet and falling computing costs, have created intense interest in electronic presentation and access to cultural and scientific heritage resources. Information technologies have offered cultural institutions new opportunities for the presentation of their holdings, which are now made accessible not only to the specialists, but also to the citizens and interested parties worldwide. The paper presents an overview of the Bulgarian experience in the field of digital preservation and access and on-going work on the project “Knowledge Transfer for the Digitisation of Scientific and Cultural Heritage to Bulgaria” (MTKD-CT-2004-509754) supported by the Marie Curie programme of the FP6 of the EC.

Development of New Solutions in the Field of Digitization and Digital Presentation of the National Folklore Heritage

This article briefly reviews the software developments for digital presentation and preservation of Bulgarian folklore treasure created within the project “Knowledge Technologies for Creation of Digital Presentation and Significant Repositories of Folklore Heritage” by teams of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics.

Bilingual Corpus - Digital Repository for Preservation of Language Heritage

The article briefly reviews bilingual Slovak-Bulgarian/Bulgarian-Slovak parallel and aligned corpus. The corpus is collected and developed as results of the collaboration in the frameworks of the joint research project between Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Sciences. 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. This bilingual corpus will be widely applicable to the contrastive studies of the both Slavic languages, will also be useful resource for language engineering research and development, especially in machine translation.

The Role of the National Library in Preserving National Written Heritage

The first part presented at the meeting by A. Dipchikova is a brief report of the role of the National library as an institution in collecting, preserving and making accessible the national written heritage. Problems of digitization are examined from the point of view of the existing experience in cataloguing. Special attention is paid to the history and the significance of international standards, the experience in the field of development and maintenance of authority files on national and international level as well as in markup languages. Possibilities of using MARC and XML in the library are discussed. The second part presented here by E. Moussakova is giving an overview of the latest activities of the Library in the sphere of digitisation of the old Slavic manuscripts which are component of the national cultural heritage. It is pointed out that the current work is rather limited within the scope of preparation of metadata than being focused on digital products.

Easy Creation of Semantics-Enhanced Digital Artwork Collections

In this paper we propose an approach for cost-effective employing of semantic technologies to improve the efficiency of searching and browsing of digital artwork collections. It is based on a semi-automatic creation of a Topic Map-based virtual art gallery portal by using existing Topic Maps tools. Such a ‘cheap’ solution could enable small art museums or art-related educational programs that lack sufficient funding for software development and publication infrastructure to take advantage of the emerging semantic technologies. The proposed approach has been used for creating the WSSU Diggs Gallery Portal.

GUIDE@HAND: Digital GPS Based Audio Guide that Brings the Past to Life

In the digital age the internet and the ICT devices changed our daily life and routines. It means we couldn't live without these services and devices anywhere (work, home, holiday, etc.). It can be experienced in the tourism sector; digital contents become key tools in the tourism of the 21st century; they will be able to adapt the traditional tourist guide methodology to the applications running on novel digital devices. Tourists belong to a new generation, an "ICT generation" using innovative tools, a new info-media to communicate. A possible direction for tourism development is to use modern ICT systems and devices. Besides participating in classical tours guided by travel guides, there is a new opportunity for individual tourists to enjoy high quality ICT based guided walks prepared on the knowledge of travel guides. The main idea of the GUIDE@HAND service is to use reusable, and create new tourism contents for an advanced mobile device, in order to give a contemporary answer to traditional systems of tourism information, by developing new tourism services based on digital contents for innovative mobile applications. The service is based on a new concept of enhancing territorial heritage and values, through knowledge, innovation, languages and multilingual solutions going along with new tourists‟ “sensitiveness”.

Bulgarian Folk Songs in a Digital Library

The paper presents the main results of an ongoing project aimed at the development of technologies for digitization of Bulgarian folk music and building a heterogeneous digital library with Bulgarian folk songs presented with their music, notes and text. An initial digitization and preservation of the Bulgarian cultural heritage starts by means of digitization and insertion into the library of over 1000 songs that were recorded and written down during the 60s and 70s of XX century. Also we present a full text search engine in a collection of lyrics (text of songs) and coded notes (symbolic melody). Some perspectives for future projects are also discussed.

Digital Repository of Information and Knowledge - Fund “BellKnow”

The aim was to develop an archive containing detailed description of church bells. As an object of cultural heritage the bell has general properties such as geometric dimensions, weight, sound of each of the bells, the pitch of the tone as well as acoustical diagrams obtained using contemporary equipment. The audio, photo and video archive is developed by using advanced technologies for analysis, reservation and data protection.

Information Technologies for the Preservation of Language Heritage

In this paper we try to present how information technologies as tools for the creation of digital bilingual dictionaries can help the preservation of natural languages. Natural languages are an outstanding part of human cultural values and for that reason they should be preserved as part of the world cultural heritage. We describe our work on the bilingual lexical database supporting the Bulgarian-Polish Online dictionary. The main software tools for the web- presentation of the dictionary are shortly described. We focus our special attention on the presentation of verbs, the richest from a specific characteristics viewpoint linguistic category in Bulgarian.