Formal Definition of the Concept “Infos”

The concept INFOS is very important for understanding the information phenomena. Because of this, it is basic for the General Information Theory. The more precise formal definition of this concept is given in the paper.

Music as the Source of Information Influence and Soul Education

Unlike other works of art (painting, sculpture, etc.) a musical composition should be performed, it should sound to become accessible. Therefore, the role of the musical masterly performance is extremely important. But presently it has increased in importance when music through mass communication media i.e. radio, television, sound recording becomes in the full sense of the word the property of millions. Art in all its genres as a means of information helps to recreate a picture of one or other epoch as a whole. Moreover, art has a profound impact on education: it can be positive or negative, creative or destructive. Let us dwell on such aspect of music as means of information and the value of musical mastery activity for brining information to hearers of the alternating generations. Unlike other works of art (painting, sculpture etc.) a musical composition should be performed, it should sound to become intelligible. Therefore, the role of the musical masterly performance is extremely important. But presently it becomes particularly great in the XXI century when music becomes a true property of the masses due to mass media – radio, television, sound recording.

An Interactive Method of Linear Mixed Integer Multicriteria Optimization

The paper describes a learning-oriented interactive method for solving linear mixed integer problems of multicriteria optimization. The method increases the possibilities of the decision maker (DM) to describe his/her local preferences and at the same time it overcomes some computational difficulties, especially in problems of large dimension. The method is realized in an experimental decision support system for finding the solution of linear mixed integer multicriteria optimization problems.

The Use of Situation Representation when Searching for Solutions in Computer Aided Design Systems

Projects solutions reuse methodology is offered for software development. The main idea consists in connection of the system objective with the situation using the entities which describe the condition of the system in the process of the objective statement. Every situation is associated with one or several design solutions, which can be used at the development. Based on this connection the situation representing language has been created, it lets to express a problem situation using a natural language describe. The similarity measure has been built to compare situations, it is based on the similarity coefficients with adding the absent part weight.

Effectiveness of Title-Search vs. Full-Text Search in the Web

Search engines sometimes apply the search on the full text of documents or web-pages; but sometimes they can apply the search on selected parts of the documents only, e.g. their titles. Full-text search may consume a lot of computing resources and time. It may be possible to save resources by applying the search on the titles of documents only, assuming that a title of a document provides a concise representation of its content. We tested this assumption using Google search engine. We ran search queries that have been defined by users, distinguishing between two types of queries/users: queries of users who are familiar with the area of the search, and queries of users who are not familiar with the area of the search. We found that searches which use titles provide similar and sometimes even (slightly) better results compared to searches which use the full-text. These results hold for both types of queries/users. Moreover, we found an advantage in title-search when searching in unfamiliar areas because the general terms used in queries in unfamiliar areas match better with general terms which tend to be used in document titles.

Empirical Methods for Development and Expanding of the Bulgarian WordNet

Some basic points from the automated creation of a Bulgarian WordNet – an analogue of the Princeton WordNet, are treated. The used computer tools, the received results and their estimation are discussed. A side effect from the proposed approach is the receiving of patterns for the Bulgarian syntactic analyzer.

Applications of Nonclassical Logic Methods for Purposes of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

* The work is partially supported by Grant no. NIP917 of the Ministry of Science and Education – Republic of Bulgaria.

XML Presentation of Documents Used for Data Exchange in Management of Genetic Resources

In the global strategy for preservation genetic resources of farm animals the implementation of information technology is of great importance. In this regards platform independent information tools and approaches for data exchange are needed in order to obtain aggregate values for regions and countries of spreading a separate breed. The current paper presents a XML based solution for data exchange in management genetic resources of farm animals’ small populations. There are specific requirements to the exchanged documents that come from the goal of data analysis. Three main types of documents are distinguished and their XML formats are discussed. DTD and XML Schema for each type are suggested. Some examples of XML documents are given also.

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.

The Experience of the Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen

The Arnamagnæan Institute, principally in the form of the present writer, has been involved in a number of projects to do with the digitisation, electronic description and text-encoding of medieval manuscripts. Several of these projects were dealt with in a previous article 'The view from the North: Some Scandinavian digitisation projects', NCD review, 4 (2004), pp. 22-30. This paper looks in some depth at two others, MASTER and CHLT. The Arnamagnæan Institute is a teaching and research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. It is named after the Icelandic scholar and antiquarian Árni Magnússon (1663-1730), secretary of the Royal Danish Archives and Professor of Danish Antiquities at the University of Copenhagen, who in the course of his lifetime built up what is arguably the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in the world, some 2,500 manuscript items, the earliest dating from the 12th century. The majority of these are from Iceland, but the collection also contains important Norwegian, Danish and Swedish manuscripts, along with approximately 100 manuscripts of continental provenance. In addition to the manuscripts proper, there are collections of original charters and apographa: 776 Norwegian (including Faroese, Shetlandic and Orcadian) charters and 2895 copies, 1571 Danish charters and 1372 copies, and 1345 Icelandic charters and 5942 copies. When he died in 1730, Árni Magnússon bequeathed his collection to the University of Copenhagen. The original collection has subsequently been augmented through individual purchases and gifts and the acquisition of a number of smaller collections, bringing the total to nearly 3000 manuscript items, which, with the charters and apographa, comprise over half a million pages.

Digitisation Processing and Recognition of Old Greek Manuscipts (the D-SCRIBE Project)

After many years of scholar study, manuscript collections continue to be an important source of novel information for scholars, concerning both the history of earlier times as well as the development of cultural documentation over the centuries. D-SCRIBE project aims to support and facilitate current and future efforts in manuscript digitization and processing. It strives toward the creation of a comprehensive software product, which can assist the content holders in turning an archive of manuscripts into a digital collection using automated methods. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing early Christian Greek manuscripts. We propose a novel digital image binarization scheme for low quality historical documents allowing further content exploitation in an efficient way. Based on the existence of closed cavity regions in the majority of characters and character ligatures in these scripts, we propose a novel, segmentation-free, fast and efficient technique that assists the recognition procedure by tracing and recognizing the most frequently appearing characters or character ligatures.

MINERVA – the Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation Towards an Agreed European Platform for Digitisation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage

MINERVA is a project funded by the European Commission IST Programme within the 5th Framework Programme. It created a network of EU Ministries and other agencies in charge of cultural policies and programmes, which is open to enlargement to new countries and new sectors of the civil society. The network discusses, correlates and harmonises the activities carried out in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage, aiming at creating a common European platform made up of agreed recommendations, guidelines, standards. The network acts also to foster collaboration between European Commission and Member States, to ensure awareness of European policies at national level, to exchange good practice, to coordinate national programmes in order to embed in national digitisation activities the technical results achieved by the network. Some main outcomes of the activities are presented.

Manuscript Digitization and Electronic Processing of Manuscripts in the Czech National Library

The paper informs about the history of manuscript digitization in the National Library of the Czech Republic as well as about other issues concerning processing of manuscripts. The main consequence of the massive digitization and record and/or full text processing is a paradigm shift leading to the digital history.

Representing of the Bulgarian Institutions: National Archives

Digitisation as an opportunity for Bulgarian National Archives to fulfill its functions as a heritage Institution and a government agency according to the new standards.

The Role of the National Library in Preserving National Written Heritage

The first part presented at the meeting by A. Dipchikova is a brief report of the role of the National library as an institution in collecting, preserving and making accessible the national written heritage. Problems of digitization are examined from the point of view of the existing experience in cataloguing. Special attention is paid to the history and the significance of international standards, the experience in the field of development and maintenance of authority files on national and international level as well as in markup languages. Possibilities of using MARC and XML in the library are discussed. The second part presented here by E. Moussakova is giving an overview of the latest activities of the Library in the sphere of digitisation of the old Slavic manuscripts which are component of the national cultural heritage. It is pointed out that the current work is rather limited within the scope of preparation of metadata than being focused on digital products.