Services for Content Creation and Presentation in an Iconographical Digital Library

Content creation and presentation are key activities in a multimedia digital library (MDL). The proper design and intelligent implementation of these services provide a stable base for overall MDL functionality. This paper presents the framework and the implementation of these services in the latest version of the “Virtual Encyclopaedia of Bulgarian Iconography” multimedia digital library. For the semantic description of the iconographical objects a tree-based annotation template is implemented. It provides options for autocompletion, reuse of values, bilingual entering of data, automated media watermarking, resizing and conversing. The paper describes in detail the algorithm for automated appearance of dependent values for different characteristics of an iconographical object. An algorithm for avoiding duplicate image objects is also included. The service for automated appearance of new objects in a collection after their entering is included as an important part of the content presentation. The paper also presents the overall service-based architecture of the library, covering its main service panels, repositories and their relationships. The presented vision is based on a long-term observation of the users’ preferences, cognitive goals, and needs, aiming to find an optimal functionality solution for the end users.

Prototyping Adaptive Online Learning Courses

This article describes the process of prototyping adaptive online learning using the authoring tool for developers, which is based on ontologies. The article also gives a brief overview of contemporary situation and describes modern trends of evolution e-learning courses and present standards in this area. It also describes architecture of system VITA II.

About Massachusetts Colleges Online June 2006 Sharing Best Practices Conference

This paper summarizes trends and issues in online learning in the United States of America as reflected in the presentations of the Massachusetts Colleges Online “Sharing Best Practices in E-Learning” Conference held on June 13-14, 2006.

Online Genetic Algorithms

This paper present a technique based on genetic algorithms for generating online adaptive services. Online adaptive systems provide flexible services to a mass of clients/users for maximising some system goals, they dynamically adapt the form and the content of the issued services while the population of clients evolve over time. The idea of online genetic algorithms (online GAs) is to use the online clients response behaviour as a fitness function in order to produce the next generation of services. The principle implemented in online GAs, “the application environment is the fitness”, allow modelling highly evolutionary domains where both services providers and clients change and evolve over time. The flexibility and the adaptive behaviour of this approach seems to be very relevant and promising for applications characterised by highly dynamical features such as in the web domain (online newspapers, e- markets, websites and advertising engines). Nevertheless the proposed technique has a more general aim for application environments characterised by a massive number of anonymous clients/users which require personalised services, such as in the case of many new IT applications.

The Cascade Neo-Fuzzy Architecture and its Online Learning Algorithm

In the paper learning algorithm for adjusting weight coefficients of the Cascade Neo-Fuzzy Neural Network (CNFNN) in sequential mode is introduced. Concerned architecture has the similar structure with the Cascade-Correlation Learning Architecture proposed by S.E. Fahlman and C. Lebiere, but differs from it in type of artificial neurons. CNFNN consists of neo-fuzzy neurons, which can be adjusted using high-speed linear learning procedures. Proposed CNFNN is characterized by high learning rate, low size of learning sample and its operations can be described by fuzzy linguistic “if-then” rules providing “transparency” of received results, as compared with conventional neural networks. Using of online learning algorithm allows to process input data sequentially in real time mode.

Online Education: What Works in Mathematics

Florida State University and University of Helsinki Information technology has the potential to deliver education to everybody by high quality online courses and associated services, and to enhance traditional face-to-face instruction by, e.g., web services offering virtually unlimited practice and step-bystep solutions to practice problems. Regardless of this, tools of information technology have not yet penetrated mathematics education in any meaningful way. This is mostly due to the inertia of academia: instructors are slow to change their working habits. This paper reports on an experiment where all the instructors (seven instructors and six teaching assistants) of a large calculus course were required to base their instruction on online content. The paper will analyze the effectiveness of various solutions used, and finishes with recommendations regarding best practices.

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.

Online Dictionary - Tool for Preservation of Language Heritage

The paper aims to represent a bilingual online dictionary as a useful tool helping preservation of the natural languages. The author focuses on the approach that was taken to develop compatible bilingual lexical database for the Bulgarian-Polish online dictionary. A formal model for the dictionary encoding is developed in accordance with the complex structures of the dictionary entries. These structures vary depending on the grammatical characteristics of Bulgarian headwords. The Web-application for presentation of the bilingual dictionary is also describred.