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”.

Business Modeling of the Application Architecture of the Bulgarian Folklore Artery

In an attempt to answer the need of wider accessibility and popularization of the treasury of Bulgarian folklore, a team from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences has planned to develop the Bulgarian folklore artery within the national project ―Knowledge Technologies for Creation of Digital Presentation and Significant Repositories of Folklore Heritage���. This paper presents the process of business modeling of the application architecture of the Bulgarian folklore artery, which aids requirements analysis, application design and its software implementation. The folklore domain process model is made in the context of the target social applications—e-learning, virtual expositions of folklore artifacts, research, news, cultural/ethno-tourism, etc. The basic processes are analyzed and modeled and some inferences are made for the use cases and requirements specification of the Bulgarian folklore artery application. As a conclusion the application architecture of the Bulgarian folklore artery is presented.

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.

Digitization of Literary Heritage in the Bulgarian Libraries: Facing Problems and Challenges

Paper deals with the current issues and challenges before digitization of literary heritage in the Bulgarian libraries. Main problems are outlined. Socialization of digitized heritage is commented.

The Knowledge in Automotive Field Representation with Modern Technologies

Modern technologies have changed the way of presenting information in archives. This makes it possible to introduce new services, which was unimaginable a few years ago. Digitalization, security and virtual presentation of objects in the sphere of motoring by application of technologies, based on knowledge about how to create digital resources is the theme of this project. The aim of AutoKnow project is to carry out a research and create a multi- media digital archive AutoKnow and Experimental Virtual Motor Laboratory (EVML) with Motor Library (ML) from digital multi-media patterns from a selected group of objects in the sphere of automobile technology, presented by NMU. This makes it possible to widely apply multi-media collections in automobile engineering, teaching, research work in that sphere and serve the interests of a large number of auto-amateurs as well in Bulgaria. The research and development of АutoKnow is in the following mutually related fields: - Creation and annotation of collections of objects in the sphere of automobiles; - Creation, analysis and security of a digital archive AutoKnow; - Design and creation of Digital Motor Library; - Socially-oriented applications in education, scientific studies and Experimental Virtual Motor Laboratory; - Informational System for teaching and testing of knowledge in the sphere of automobiles MindCheck.

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 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.

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.

3D Reconstruction of Cultural Values at the Regional History Museum-Veliko Tarnovo

The project paper presents the work done by the Regional History Museum – Veliko Tarnovo (RHM) on 3D reconstruction of cultural values and objects from the Veliko Tarnovo region – the St Peter and St Paul church in Veliko Tarnovo, the chorus of the metropolitan Nativity church in Arbanassi and the St. Dimitar church in Arbanassi.

The Future of the Next-Generation Internet and Possible Applications into Education and Culture Heritage

There are several initiatives such as: US Ignite, Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow, Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), WiMAX and Internet 2 dealing with the future of the internet. The goal of the paper is to understand the goals, intricacies, and nuances of some of these techniques and show some of the possibilities of next-generation high-speed networking and their applications into education and culture heritage.

Knowledge-based Virtual Reconstruction of Museum Artifacts

Within the framework of heritage preservation, 3D scanning and modeling for heritage documentation has increased significantly in recent years, mainly due to the evolution of laser and image-based techniques, modeling software, powerful computers and virtual reality. 3D laser acquisition constitutes a real development opportunity for 3D modeling based previously on theoretical data. The representation of the object information rely on the knowledge of its historic and theoretical frame to reconstitute a posteriori its previous states. This project proposes an approach dealing with data extraction based on architectural knowledge and Laser statement informing measurements, the whole leading to 3D reconstruction. The experimented Khmer objects are exposed at Guimet museum in Paris. The purpose of this digital modeling meets the need of exploitable models for simulation projects, prototyping, exhibitions, promoting cultural tourism and particularly for archiving against any likely disaster and as an aided tool for the formulation of virtual museum concept.

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.

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.

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.