Zoran Ognjanović
(Matematički institut SANU)
1. Introduction. Recently, important efforts have been made to digitize, preserve, describe and index the cultural and scientific heritage all over the world. This project will study interdisciplinary topics that arise during such a process. Multimedia scanning and organizing (for every kind of relevant objects), storage and retrieval methods will be investigated, evaluated and applied. Our aim is to design models and construct prototypes of information systems that should be used in Yugoslav cultural and scientific institutions having in mind that their goals include offering easy access to cultural heritage to large populations of public users, as well as experts.
Digitization of the cultural and scientific heritage means creating multimedia databases containing images, movies, sounds, factual data, etc., and descriptions of items (paintings, sculptures, monuments, old texts, scientific journals and books, …) that constitute the heritage. Moreover, digitization consists not only in collecting and storing, but provides also the opportunity to much better organize the data using meta data, and to display, preserve and access the resulting information. It is well known that making digital representation is of use in the full sense of those words only if indexing of items is done at the same time. Finally, digitized data themselves become a new value and allow further processing using advanced software tools, like experts systems, data mining and the other artificial intelligence products.
Numerous institutions of our region are in possession of a large number of scientific journals and rare books, archive documents, textual and image data, as well as the other cultural and scientific values. Many of these items are of the global interest. The contemporary technology permits efficient organization in the form of multimedia information systems, and opens new possibilities in building archives and devices for searching, retrieving and presenting of the heritage to general audience and scientific community. There were several attempts to present digitilized parts of the cultural and scientific heritage in Yugoslavia. However, the obtained presentations suffer from incompatibility (and sometimes incompleteness) caused by different approaches and different formats that were used.
In order to analyse the above problems properly and to obtain satisfactory results we have decided to form a consortium, which contains most of the leading Yugoslav cultural and research institutions. The consortium, called National Center for Digitization, includes Mathematical institute Belgrade, National Library of Serbia, National Museum Belgrade, Archaeological Institute Belgrade, Archives of Republic Serbia, Serbian Institute for Monument Protection, and Mathematical faculty Belgrade. However, collaboration with other Yugoslav cultural and research institutions as well as the similar projects from abroad is expected.
2. Subject of research
3. Planned activities
· digital data storage formats and data structure for different kinds of objects that form the cultural and scientific heritage (pictures, sound, video, electronic publications containing plain and mathematical texts, etc.),
· designing and managing local data bases of Yugoslav cultural and scientific institutions involved in the project,
· protocols for access to the digitized data including some uniform middleware and end-user interfaces for all types of information resources, rights management, thesaurus, search procedures etc.,
· tools for storage, processing and presentation of the digitized data,
· digitized data protection including access restrictions, data authentication, etc.
4. The main phases of the project
1. Establishing the infrastructure and analysis of the current state of affairs
During the first year of the project the main tasks will be:
· To identify the groups involved (institutions, owners, researchers, funding organisations)
· To establish organization of National Center for Digitization,
· To determine the current state of the affairs in Yugoslav cultural and research institutions,
· To set the main standards for the cultural and scientific heritage digitization and methodology of design and the architecture of this kind of data.
As a result of this phase we expect that a global strategy for the cultural and scientific heritage digitization in Yugoslavia will be defined. Also, a general time table for the further activities will be prepared.
2. Particular digitization subprojects
According to the above mentioned global strategy for the cultural and scientific heritage digitization, we shall determine the most important collections of cultural and scientific qvalues that should be digitized first. In the phases following this one, the chosen collections will be digitized depending on the available recources.
3. Development of Yugoslav cultural and scientific heritage information system
Parallel to the digitization process we shall design a model of a global information system for the cultural and scientific heritage. The model of the system should guarantee that the parts of the system are as compatible as possible. Also, the model should allow users a uniform interface and access to the relevant data from different sources having in mind different restrictions. In the next stage the corresponding software should be implemented. We expect that the main communication infrastructure of the system would be Internet and WWW.
Zahvaljujemo se dr Zoranu Markoviću koji je i sadržajno i jezički znatno poboljšao engleski deo teksta.
Matematički institut SANU
Kneza Mihaila 35, 11000 Beograd
www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/~zorano