Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum – Meeting the Challenges of Digitisation

The conservation, spread, comprehension and recreation of traditional culture heritages is one of the main purpose of the National Ethnographic Museum in Bulgaria. As other cultural and scientific heritage institutions, it begins to use new information technologies and strategies for providing access to its cultural heritage treasures. This paper aims to present digital libraries with multimedia content as a modern technological solution for innovative presentation of Bulgarian ethnographical heritage. It includes some basic concepts of digital libraries with multimedia content and a description of three types of architecture. The paper also describes the ideas, conceptual decisions and strategies in the project Experimental Digital Library “Bulgarian Ethnographic Treasury”.

Towards Content-Sensitive Access to the Artefacts of the Bulgarian Iconography

his paper presents an ontological model of the knowledge about Bulgarian iconographical artefacts. It also describes content-sensitive services for access, browse, search and group iconographical objects, based on the presented ontology that will be implemented in the multimedia digital library “Virtual encyclopedia of Bulgarian iconography”.

Use of Knowledge Technologies for Presentation of Bulgarian Folklore Heritage Semantics

Preserving and presenting the Bulgarian folklore heritage is a long-term commitment of scholars and researchers working in many areas. This article presents ontological model of the Bulgarian folklore knowledge, exploring knowledge technologies for presenting the semantics of the phenomena of our traditional culture. This model is a step to the development of the digital library for the “Bulgarian Folklore Heritage” virtual exposition which is a part of the “Knowledge Technologies for Creation of Digital Presentation and Significant Repositories of Folklore Heritage” project.

Organization and Security of the Audio and Video Archive for Unique Bulgarian Bells

AMS Subj. Classification: H.3.7 Digital Libraries, K.6.5 Security and Protection

Дигиталните библиотеки – информационни маркери на образованието

Доклад, поместен в сборника на Националната конференция "Образованието в информационното общество", Пловдив, май 2011 г.

Fast Information Retrieval in the Open Grid Service Architecture

This is an extended version of an article presented at the Second International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, 11–12 September 2010.

Share.TEC Portal: How the Metadata Repositories of Educational Resources Meet the Users’ Expectations

This is an extended version of an article presented at the Second International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, 11–12 September 2010.

Adaptive Document Image Binarization with Application in Processing Astronomical Logbooks

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): I.7, I.7.5.

Цифровите библиотеки в обучението на учители

Krassen Stefanov, Pavel Boytchev, Eliza Stefanova, Atanas Georgiev, Nikolina Nikolova, Alexander Grigorov - This paper discusses the role of the contemporary European digital libraries in teachers education. It presents a digital repository of metadata resources for teachers education, as well as a portal for the community of practices, build around the repository. Both the repository and the community are developed in the frame of the European project Share.TEC. The paper describes teachers’ and teachers educators’ expectations from the system. In addition, the adaptability model, on which the system is based on, and its realization in the portal are presented.

Online Access to the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum

Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum project aims at building a repertoire of medieval and early modern Bulgarian texts for saints in combination with ethnological data and some visual sources. A basic project task is to produce an accessible on-line digital repository of this valuable cultural heritage treasure. The paper presents the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum environment, its architecture, functional specification, application modeling process and software implementation. The paper also discusses the specifics of the ―Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum‖ project and its knowledge domain. The paper also presents the integration between the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum and the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, a digital library keeping rare specimens, private collections of Orthodox icons, wall- paintings and other iconographical objects, selected from difficult-to-access storages, distant churches, chapels, and monasteries, objects in a risk environment or unstable conditions.

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.

Medieval Sources and Present-Day Folklore Materials on Saints in an Electronic Encyclopedia

This paper discusses the variety of the digitized content of an electronic encyclopedia on the veneration of saints according to Bulgarian sources. The emphasis is on medieval Slavonic Church manuscripts and on present-day records of Bulgarian folklore narratives and songs. The combination of these sources provokes discussion of the so-called folklore Christianity and adds new dimensions to the understanding of the role of the cults of saints for culture and of the religiosity of the Bulgarians.

Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum: Activity, Users, Statistics

Encyclopaedia slavica sanctorum (eslavsanct.net) is designed as a complex heterogenous multimedia product. It is part of the project Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum: Saints and Holy Places in Bulgaria (in electronic and Guthenberg versions). Until 2013, its web-based platform for online management and presentation of structured digital content has been prepared and numerous materials have been input. The platform is developed using the server technologies PHP, MySQL and HTML, JavaScript, CSS on the client side. The search in the e-ESS can be made by different parameters (12, or combinations of parameters), such as saints’ or feasts’ names, type of sainthood, types of texts dedicated to the saints, dates of saints’ commemorations, and several others. Both guests and registered users can search in the e-ESS but the latter have access to much more information including the publications of original sources. The e-platform allows for making statistics of what have been searched and read. The software used for content and access analysis is BI tool QlikView. As an analysis services provider, it is connected to the e-ESS objects repository and tracking services by a preliminary created data warehouse. The data warehouse is updated automatically, achieving real time analytics solution. The paper discusses some of the statistics results of the use of the e-ESS: the activities of the editors, users, and guests, the types of searches, the most often viewed object, such as the date of January 1 and the article on St. Basil the Great which is one of the richest encyclopaedia articles and includes both matadata and original sources published, both from medieval Slavonic manuscripts and popular culture records.

Towards Wider Sharing of Iconographical Art Content

Information and multimedia technologies that have been developed during the past couple of years provided new e-tools to memory institutions (viz. museum, libraries, galleries, etc.), reviving the valuable treasure made by generation of people. Digital libraries (DLs) are such powerful contemporary tools for cultural heritage presentation, preservation and archiving. However, DLs power will in-crease significantly if they use mechanisms for ubiquitous sharing of their e-artefacts and they distribute attractive content in the social networks, reflecting community demands and needs. This paper presents a service for automatic sharing of iconographical artefacts and full collections from the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library to selected Facebook communities. In this case the service will be used for widely promotion of knowledge about East-Christian Iconographical Art and Culture, but I could be used not only for this and not only in this domain.

Multilingualism and conceptual modelling

One of the leading motivations behind the multilingual semantic web is to make resources accessible digitally in an online global multilingual context. Consequently, it is fundamental for knowledge bases to find a way to manage multilingualism and thus be equipped with those procedures for its conceptual modelling. In this context, the goal of this paper is to discuss how common-sense knowledge and cultural knowledge are modelled in a multilingual framework. More particularly, multilingualism and conceptual modelling are dealt with from the perspective of FunGramKB, a lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language understanding. This project argues for a clear division between the lexical and the conceptual dimensions of knowledge. Moreover, the conceptual layer is organized into three modules, which result from a strong commitment towards capturing semantic knowledge (Ontology), procedural knowledge (Cognicon) and episodic knowledge (Onomasticon). Cultural mismatches are discussed and formally represented at the three conceptual levels of FunGramKB.