Automatized Generation of Metadata and Calibrated Test Item Banks for E-learning

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

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.

Links and Hubs of Scientific Information – the Case of the MTMT

We present the Hungarian National Scientific Bibliography project: the MTMT. We argue that presently available commercial systems cannot be used as a comprehensive national bibliometric tool. The new database was created from existing databases of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but expected to be re-engineered in the future. The data curation model includes harvesting, the work of expert bibliographers and author feedback. MTMT will work together with the other services in the web of scientific information, using standard protocols and formats, and act as a hub. It will present the scientific output of Hungary together with the repositories containing the full text, wherever available. The database will be open, but not freely harvestable, and only for non-commercial use.

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.

Research of the Acoustic Characteristics of the Bell "Mazepa" of the Sofia Cathedral (Kiev) and their Comparison with Characteristics of Bulgarian Bells

Experimental researches of one of the eldest bells («Mazepa»-see Appendix1) in Ukraine, are considered in the article. The spectra and spectra- time analysis of bell ringing is embodied, main frequencies of oscillation and musical intervals of sounding are determined. Comparative description of bell sounding with the known bells of Russia and Bulgaria is given.

Language Resources – a Part of World Cultural Heritage

This article briefly reviews multilingual language resources for Bulgarian, developed in the frame of some international projects: the first-ever annotated Bulgarian MTE digital lexical resources, Bulgarian-Polish corpus, Bulgarian-Slovak parallel and aligned corpus, and Bulgarian-Polish-Lithuanian corpus. These resources are valuable multilingual dataset for language engineering research and development for Bulgarian language. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Personal Work Space and Content Analysis Functionality in a Cultural Heritage Digital Library

The paper presents a different vision for personalization of the user’s stay in a cultural heritage digital library that models services for personalized content marking, commenting and analyzing that doesn’t require strict user profile, but aims at adjusting the user’s individual needs. The solution is borrowed from real work and studying of traditional written content sources (incl. books, manuals), where the user mainly performs activities such as underlining the important parts of the content, writing notes and inferences, selecting and marking zones of their interest in pictures, etc. In the paper a special attention is paid to the ability to execute learning analysis allowing different ways for the user to experience the digital library content with more creative settings.

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.

NBU Digital Collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials”

Our experience in maintaining digital collections is described, which urged us to go deep in the process and build centralized digitalization policy. It instigated developing new strategy, adopting new technological solutions and staff training. The emphasis falls is placed on our digital collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials” as an example of a focused digitization at the New Bulgarian University (NBU) Library and our answer to modern trends in launching digital collections. Our future digitization plans are also discussed.

Students’ Digital Archive at the State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia

The paper describes the creation and content of the digital archive of photographs, films and materials from fieldwork (interviews, surveys, and observations) of students from the Information Funds of the Cultural and Historical Heritage program at the State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria. The text discusses the educational opportunities of the archive, and the plans for publishing it as CD and for conversion into an electronic archive on the Internet.

Online Catalogue – Relics from the Bulgarian Museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885

The goal of the online catalogue “Relics from the Bulgarian museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885” (http://muzeini-relikvi.net) is simple – to connect museums from across the country and inspire them to collect and upload different cultural relics (in this case – relics from the Unification of Bulgaria). The idea behind this is to engage them in a culture of sharing and participating in common initiatives, where, for example, a curator from Varna will be able to see that some of the artifacts he or she needs for an exhibition are in Karlovo or Plovdiv.