Virtual Environments as an Education Tool for Digital Natives

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2013

Digital Art and Design

The desire to create unique things and give free rain to one's imagination served as a powerful impetus to the development of digital art and design software. The commoner was the use of computers the wider variety of professional software was developed. Nowadays the creators and computer designers are receiving more and more new and advanced programs that allow their ideas becoming virtual reality. This research paper looks at the history of the development of graphic editors from the simplest to the most modern and advanced. This brief survey includes the history of different graphic editors’ creation, their features and abilities. This paper highlights the two basic branches of graphic editors – these that are in free use and commercial graphic editors design software. The researcher selected the most powerful and influential graphic editors design software brands like Paint.NET and GIMP among free software and commercial Adobe Photoshop. This paper also dwells upon the way digital art transferred from the exclusively professional business into the hobby for ordinary users. This research paper bears implications for those who are interested in features and potentiality of most popular graphic editors design software.

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.

Design of Fractional Order Digital Differentiators and Integrators Using Indirect Discretization

Mathematics Subject Classification: 26A33, 93B51, 93C95

Digital Preservation and Web Access to the Konkoly Observatory Schmidt Telescope Plate Archive

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): J.2.

Survey of Existing Services in the Mathematical Digital Libraries and Repositories in the EuDML Project

This paper presents a survey of the existing services provided by the digital libraries and repositories on mathematics of the content provider partners in the EuDML project. The purpose is to support the development of the concepts, criteria and methods for the continuous evaluation of these and new relevant existing services. The work was concentrated on the classification of the relevant services in order to specify a common evaluating structure.

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.

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.

Web-application for Presentation of Bulgarian Language Heritage: Bilingual Digital Corpora and Dictionaries

The paper describes three software packages - the main components of a software system for processing and web-presentation of Bulgarian language resources – parallel corpora and bilingual dictionaries. The author briefly presents current versions of the core components “Dictionary” and “Corpus” as well as the recently developed component “Connection” that links both “Dictionary” and “Corpus”. The components main functionalities are described as well. Some examples of the usage of the system’s web-applications are included.

Grid and Simulation of Digital Communication Systems

The purpose of this paper is to turn researchers' attention to the use of grid computing for simulating digital communications and its large potential for decreasing significantly the duration of the experiments and for improving the statistical representativeness and reliability of the obtained results.

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.

Digital Collections in Regional Public Library “P. R. Slaveikov” – Veliko Tarnovo in the Context of the National Program for Preservation and Promotion of Literary Heritage

Nowadays the great public libraries in Bulgaria are gaining the appearance of digital centers which provide new informational resources and services in the digital space. The digital conversion as a way of preservation is one of the important priorities of Regional Public Library in Veliko Tarnovo. In the last few years we persistently search for possible ways of financing by national and foreign programs in this direction. In the beginning the strategy was oriented to digitalization of the funds with most urgent conversion – these of the local studies periodicals from 1878 till 1944 year. The digitalization of funds will create conditions of laying the basement of full text database of Bulgarian periodical publications. The technology that is offered gives opportunities for including other libraries in the Unified index, which can develop it into a National Unified index of periodical publications. The integrated informational environment that is created is an attractive, comfortable and useful place for work in home or at work for researchers, historians, art experts, bibliographers. The library readers use very actively all informational services of the library internet page and work competently with the on-line indexes provided there, they find the necessary title, which can be demanded later for usage in home or in the library, using electronic means again.

Development, Annotation and Protection of Digital Archive “Bulgarian Folklore Heritage”

The key to prosperity in today's world is access to digital content and skills to create new content. Investigations of folklore artifacts is the topic of this article, presenting research related to the national program „Knowledge Technologies for Creation of Digital Presentation and Significant Repositories of Folklore Heritage” (FolkKnow). FolkKnow aims to build a digital multimedia archive "Bulgarian Folklore Heritage” (BFH) and virtual information portal with folk media library of digitized multimedia objects from a selected collection of the fund of Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum (IEFSEM) of the Bulgarian Academy of Science (BAS). The realization of the project FolkKnow gives opportunity for wide social applications of the multimedia collections, for the purposes of Interactive distance learning/self-learning, research activities in the field of Bulgarian traditional culture and for the cultural and ethno-tourism. We study, analyze and implement techniques and methods for digitization of multimedia objects and their annotation. In the paper are discussed specifics approaches used to building and protect a digital archive with multimedia content. Tasks can be systematized in the following guidelines: * Digitization of the selected samples * Analysis of the objects in order to determine the metadata of selected artifacts from selected collections and problem areas * Digital multimedia archive * Socially-oriented applications and virtual exhibitions artery * Frequency dictionary tool for texts with folklore themes * A method of modern technologies of protecting intellectual property and copyrights on digital content developed for use in digital exposures.

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.

Bulgarian Digital Mathematical Library BulDML and Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML-CZ as parts of the European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML

The paper presents in brief the Bulgarian Digital Mathematical Library BulDML and the Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML-CZ. Both libraries use the open source software DSpace and both are partners in the European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML. We describe their content and metadata schemas; outline the architecture system and overview the statistics of its use.