Policy Framework and Roadmap for Open Access, Open Research Data and Open Science

Overview of the growth of policies and a critical appraisal of the issues affecting open access, open data and open science policies. Example policies and a roadmap for open access, open research data and open science are included.

Open Access to Publications and Research Data in Horizon 2020: What Are the Requirements and How Can Institutional Repositories and OpenAIRE Help to Meet Them?

In the last decade the principle of Open Access to publicly funded research has been getting a growing support from policy makers and funders across Europe, both at national level and within the European Union context. At European level some of the first relevant steps taken by the European Research Council (ERC) with a statement supporting Open Access (2006), shortly followed by guidelines for researchers funded by the ERC (2007) stating that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC funded projects should be made openly accessible shortly after their publication. Those guidelines were revised in October 2013, reinforcing the mandatory character of the requirements and expanding them to monographs.

The Fifth National Information Day: Open Access to Scientific Information and Data

This work was supported in part by the EU „2nd Generation Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe" (OpenAIRE+). The autumn training school Development and Promotion of Open Access to Scientific Information and Research is organized in the frame of the Fourth International Conference on Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage—DiPP2014 (September 18–21, 2014, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, http://dipp2014.math.bas.bg/), organized under the UNESCO patronage. The main organiser is the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences with the support of EU project FOSTER (http://www.fosteropenscience.eu/) and the P. R. Slaveykov Regional Public Library in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Trends in Digital Cultural Heritage Management and Applications

We present some recent trends in the field of digital cultural heritage management and applications including digital cultural data curation, interoperability, open linked data publishing, crowd sourcing, visualization, platforms for digital cultural heritage, and applications. We present some examples from research and development projects of MUSIC/TUC in those areas.

Digital Libraries as a Social Media

This paper presents an innovative approach for enhancing digital libraries functionalities. An innovative distributed architecture involving digital libraries for effective and efficient knowledge sharing was developed. In the frame of this architecture semantic services were implemented, offering multi language and multi culture support, adaptability and knowledge resources recommendation, based on the use of ontologies, metadata and user modeling. New methods for teacher education using digital libraries and knowledge sharing were developed. These new methods were successfully applied in more than 15 pilot experiments in seven European countries, with more than 3000 teachers trained.

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.

Preserving Linked Data

PRELIDA (PREserving LInked DAta) is an FP7 Coordination Action funded by the European Commission under the Digital Preservation Theme. PRELIDA targets the particular stakeholders of the Linked Data community, including data providers, service providers, technology providers and end user communities. These stakeholders have not been traditionally targeted by the Digital Preservation community, and are typically not aware of the digital preservation solutions already available. So an important task of PRELIDA is to raise awareness of existing preservation solutions and to facilitate their uptake. At the same time, the Linked Data cloud has specific characteristics in terms of structuring, interlinkage, dynamicity and distribution that pose new challenges to the preservation community. PRELIDA organises in-depth discussions among the two communities to identify which of these characteristics require novel solutions, and to develop road maps for addressing the new challenges. PRELIDA will complete its lifecycle at the end of this year, and the talk will report about the major findings.

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.

Aggregating Local Descriptors for Epigraphs Recognition

In this paper, we consider the task of recognizing epigraphs in images such as photos taken using mobile devices. Given a set of 17,155 photos related to 14,560 epigraphs, we used a k-NearestNeighbor approach in order to perform the recognition. The contribution of this work is in evaluating state-of-the-art visual object recognition techniques in this specific context. The experimental results conducted show that Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors obtained aggregating SIFT descriptors is the best choice for this task.

PanamaTipico.com: a Born Digital Initiative for Researching and Preserving Panama’s Cultural Heritage

This paper reflects on the experience of PanamaTipico.com, an independent website specialized in the research and preservation of the cultural heritage of the Republic of Panama, a developing country located in Central America. Basic information about the project is described. Also discussed, are some of the challenges confronted by the project and the results achieved. The goal of this paper is to encourage a discussion on whether or not the experience of Pan-amaTipico.com is comparable to the experiences of similar projects in developing countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Recent Developments in Digital Mathematics Libraries

The paper presents recent developments in the domain of digital mathematics libraries towards the envisioned 21st Century Global Library for Mathematics. The Bulgarian Digital Mathematical Library BulDML and the Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML-CZ are founding partners of the EuDML Initiative and through it contribute to the sustainable development of the European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML and to the global advancements in this area.

Internet Social Networks – Benefits and Risks

Доклад, поместен в сборника на Националната конференция "Образованието в информационното общество", Пловдив, май, 2012 г.

The power of the powerless:neighbourhood based self-help networks of the poor in Istanbul

Recent poverty research focuses on the household responses to poverty through structure vs. agency perspectives. The human agency perspective, however, provides us important insights for looking beyond these simplistic tendencies which assume poor people as inherently passive, or envision them as helpless victims. In Turkey, politicians view poverty as a temporary and manageable problem which can be dealt with the provision of more charity or community support. Migrant networks, informal sector work and social assistance are considered to be important mechanisms that would provide resources for the poor. This paper argues that for some of the poor households none of these mechanisms provide sufficient resources. Instead, neighbourhood-based small-group solidarities and self-help networks enable those poor to develop collective capabilities and make ends meet. The paper also reveals that in Turkey, the implementation of social policies for poverty reduction could bring about relationships of patronage and in some cases contribute to existing inequalities.

Better queue management in a busy public hospital of a developing country without appointment system::an application using data envelopment analysis

Queuing is a key efficiency criterion in any service industry, including Healthcare. Almost all queue management studies are dedicated to improving an existing Appointment System. In developing countries such as Pakistan, there are no Appointment Systems for outpatients, resulting in excessive wait times. Additionally, excessive overloading, limited resources and cumbersome procedures lead to over-whelming queues. Despite numerous Healthcare applications, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has not been applied for queue assessment. The current study aims to extend DEA modelling and demonstrate its usefulness by evaluating the queue system of a busy public hospital in a developing country, Pakistan, where all outpatients are walk-in; along with construction of a dynamic framework dedicated towards the implementation of the model. The inadequate allocation of doctors/personnel was observed as the most critical issue for long queues. Hence, the Queuing-DEA model has been developed such that it determines the ‘required’ number of doctors/personnel. The results indicated that given extensive wait times or length of queue, or both, led to high target values for doctors/personnel. Hence, this crucial information allows the administrators to ensure optimal staff utilization and controlling the queue pre-emptively, minimizing wait times. The dynamic framework constructed, specifically targets practical implementation of the Queuing-DEA model in resource-poor public hospitals of developing countries such as Pakistan; to continuously monitor rapidly changing queue situation and display latest required personnel. Consequently, the wait times of subsequent patients can be minimized, along with dynamic staff scheduling in the absence of appointments. This dynamic framework has been designed in Excel, requiring minimal training and work for users and automatic update features, with complex technical aspects running in the background. The proposed model and the dynamic framework has the potential to be applied in similar public hospitals, even in other developing countries, where appointment systems for outpatients are non-existent.

E-közigazgatás Európában? Jelen és jövő (E-Government in Europe)

A jövő közigazgatásában az ügyfélbarát ügyfélszolgálat több olyan elektronikus csatornán is jelen lesz, amelyek csoportját jelenleg az on-line internetkapcsolat, a mobiltelefon és az interaktív digitális televízió, a jövőben az on-line interaktív multimédia képviseli. Az európai elektronikus közigazgatási fejlődési trend arra mutat, hogy a jövőben internet, mobilinternet és/vagy intelligens kábel tv technológiát alkalmazva, egy virtuálisan élő ügyintézővel beszélgetve juthat az ügyfél információhoz, foglalhat időpontot és indíthat érdemi ügyintézést. ________ In the course of future’s customer friendly public administration there will be some info-communication channels which are represented today by the on-line Internet accessibility, mobile telephones, and interactive digital television and the forthcoming interactive multimedia. The European trend of the development of public administration relies on Internet mobile Internet and/or intelligent cable television technology employing virtual adminsitrators as real time partner sin obtaining office information, booking appointments or launching adminsitration workflow.