Visible and Invisible Bulgarian Heritage (One research under the Bulgarian Heritage published on the Web)

This paper dials with presentations of the Bulgarian Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Cyberspace. The study was taking place at the Information management course with bachelor students in Information Technologies, Information Brokerage and Information Security at the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies. The students describe about 300 different objectives – cultural and historical, material and immaterial.

Virtual Encyclopaedia of the Bulgarian Iconography

East-Christian icon art is recognised as one of the most significant areas of the art of painting. Regrettably, it is still being neglected in the digital documentation and the registry of the art of painting. The accessibility to that large part of mankind's cultural and historical ancestry would be enhanced greatly if icons of all possible kinds and origins were digitised, classified, and „exhibited“ in the Internet. That would allow the preservation and even the future digital restoration of a large number of rare specimens of the East-Christian art of painting. This article aims to introduce how modern techniques from the area of digital libraries can be used for implementing the demonstrative multimedia library “Virtual encyclopaedia of the Bulgarian iconography ” 4, containing a large number of Bulgarian iconic art masterpieces and iconography of various authors, periods and schools.

Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum – Meeting the Challenges of Digitisation

The conservation, spread, comprehension and recreation of traditional culture heritages is one of the main purpose of the National Ethnographic Museum in Bulgaria. As other cultural and scientific heritage institutions, it begins to use new information technologies and strategies for providing access to its cultural heritage treasures. This paper aims to present digital libraries with multimedia content as a modern technological solution for innovative presentation of Bulgarian ethnographical heritage. It includes some basic concepts of digital libraries with multimedia content and a description of three types of architecture. The paper also describes the ideas, conceptual decisions and strategies in the project Experimental Digital Library “Bulgarian Ethnographic Treasury”.

Online Access to the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum

Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum project aims at building a repertoire of medieval and early modern Bulgarian texts for saints in combination with ethnological data and some visual sources. A basic project task is to produce an accessible on-line digital repository of this valuable cultural heritage treasure. The paper presents the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum environment, its architecture, functional specification, application modeling process and software implementation. The paper also discusses the specifics of the ―Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum‖ project and its knowledge domain. The paper also presents the integration between the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum and the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, a digital library keeping rare specimens, private collections of Orthodox icons, wall- paintings and other iconographical objects, selected from difficult-to-access storages, distant churches, chapels, and monasteries, objects in a risk environment or unstable conditions.

Types and Annotations for CIDOC CRM Properties

The CIDOC CRM provides an extensive ontology for describing entities and properties appearing in cultural heritage (CH) documentation, history and archeology. CRM provides some means for describing information about properties (property types, attribute assignment, and "long-cuts") and guidelines for extending the vocabulary. However, these means are far from complete, and in some cases there is little guidance how to "implement" them in RDF. In this article we outline the problems, relate them to established RDF patterns and mechanisms, and describe several implementation alternatives.

Bulgariana: A Bulgarian Aggregator to Europeana

Europeana is the European virtual museum which was established in 2008. Its ambition is to create a common space allowing to access the cultural heritage of Europe from a single portal, by creating a network in all European countries. To make the initiative technically possible, Europeana has built a technological infrastructure to aggregate metadata from the different Europeana countries and memory institutions, while keeping the original digitized content on their sites. This paper presents Bulgariana, the Bulgarian chapter of Europeana. It is part of the technical infrastructure of Europeana, an established technical aggregator of Bulgarian cultural heritage content. It uses the two Europeana representation models ESE and EDM. Bulgariana is also a community building initiative putting in place a Bulgarian wide network of professionals and institutions working together to preserve and present Bulgarian cultural heritage around the world.

Research on Linguistic Approaches, Used for Semantic Explanation of Bell’s Knowledge

This paper presents a research of linguistic structure of Bulgarian bells knowledge. The idea of building semantic structure of Bulgarian bells appeared during the “Multimedia fund - BellKnow” project. In this project was collected a lots of data about bells, their structure, history, technical data, etc. This is the first attempt for computation linguistic explain of bell knowledge and deliver a semantic representation of that knowledge. Based on this research some linguistic components, aiming to realize different types of analysis of text objects are implemented in term dictionaries. Thus, we lay the foundation of the linguistic analysis services in these digital dictionaries aiding the research of kinds, number and frequency of the lexical units that constitute various bell objects.

Building OWL Ontology of Unique Bulgarian Bells Using Protégé Platform

We describe an ontological representation of data in 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. We use Protégé platform in order to define basic ontological objects and relations between them.

Europeana Creative. EDM Endpoint. Custom Views

The paper discusses the Europeana Creative project which aims to facilitate re-use of cultural heritage metadata and content by the creative industries. The paper focuses on the contribution of Ontotext to the project activities. The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is further discussed as a new proposal for structuring the data that Europeana will ingest, manage and publish. The advantages of using EDM instead of the current ESE metadata set are highlighted. Finally, Ontotext’s EDM Endpoint is presented, based on OWLIM semantic repository and SPARQL query language. A user-friendly RDF view is presented in order to illustrate the possibilities of Forest - an extensible modular user interface framework for creating linked data and semantic web applications.

Virtual Celebrator Machine

There has been a huge growth of social network in the recent years. This trend does not only allow us to get connected and share the information in an efficient way, but also reveals some potential beneficial in dealing with several social issues, such as earthquake detection, social spam detection, flu pandemic tracking, media monitoring, etc. In this paper, we propose a new way of utilizing social network. By implementing what is called a Virtual Celebrator Machine (VCM), we are able to let everyone who has connection with this machine in term of social networking be able to share their cultural experience and points of view about certain social events locally or globally. In that way, we provide a way to reinforce the relationship and connection between people virtually, which, we believe, would help to flourish cultural heritage preservation.

Virtual Reconstruction of the Ancient Russian Fortress Koporye

One of the major strategic tasks in Russia’s northwest of the past centuries was the defense of the country’s territories from enemy incursions coming from the West. In order to solve this task, a robust shield in the form of a system of fortresses was created between the 13th and 15th centuries. The system included such fortresses as Koporye, Yam, Korela, Oreshek, and others. In our age, these monuments have become an essential part of Russia’s historic and cultural heritage and an important element of the tourism cluster “The Silver Ring of Russia.” The Centre of Design and Multimedia at St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, jointly with the Department of History and the Faculty of Arts at St. Petersburg State University, working under a three-year grant from the Russian Foundation for Humanities Research (#12-01-12041), is implementing a multimedia information system “Ancient Fortresses of Russia’s Northwest”. Historically accurate virtual reconstruction of several fortresses as they existed during certain historic periods, done in such a way as to allow the future creation of virtual tours of these sites, has become the focus of this project’s research. In the present paper, we describe the main phases and results of virtual reconstruction of the best-preserved fortress, Koporye.

Digitization and Preservation of City Landmarks Using Limited and Free Web Services

This paper presents a practical approach for digitizing city landmarks based on free and limited Web resources. The digital replicas are then placed on the Web using popular services, like Google earth, and are accessible to a huge user base. The method is easily applicable and quite valuable to organizations with limited funding.

The Odrysian Kingdom – a Concept of an Interactive Multimedia Application for Educational Purposes

The presentation of cultural heritage is difficult comprehensive and constantly updated topic. Researchers often focus more on the different techniques to digitize artifacts of cultural heritage. This work focuses on the overall shape and structure of future multimedia application whose specificity is determined by the topic - Odrysian kingdom. Below is presented a concept for structure and content-based information available for individual kings from Odryssae dynasty. Special attention is paid to the presentation of preserved artifacts associated with the reign of specific rulers. The main concept of multimedia application dedicated to the Odrysian kingdom, it is to be used in teaching programs related to cultural heritage and history of antiquity in universities. The aim of designers is that it can be modified easy for use in museums also.

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.

Augmented Reality as a Method for Expanded Presentation of Objects of Digitized Heritage

Augmented reality is the latest among information technologies in modern electronics industry. The essence is in the addition of advanced computer graphics in real and/or digitized images. This paper gives a brief analysis of the concept and the approaches to implementing augmented reality for an expanded presentation of a digitized object of national cultural and/or scientific heritage. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): H.5.1, H.5.3, I.3.7.