Development of New Solutions in the Field of Digitization and Digital Presentation of the National Folklore Heritage

This article briefly reviews the software developments for digital presentation and preservation of Bulgarian folklore treasure created within the project “Knowledge Technologies for Creation of Digital Presentation and Significant Repositories of Folklore Heritage” by teams of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics.Contract IO-03/2006, Information Society Programme (leader: Assoc. Prof. Dr Galina Bogdanova), partly funding this article

The management and integration of biomedical knowledge: Application in the health-e-child project (position paper)

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children’s health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases

Book Review: Archival Arrangement and Description

The 2013 book Archival Arrangement and Description, the first installment in SAA’s “Trends in Archival Practice,” has broad appeal for archivists with different professional duties and in a variety of repository settings. Published as both an e-book and a print edition, this book is built on flexibility and user needs. Editors Christopher J. Prom and Thomas J. Frusciano offer a great introduction for the three modules that constitute the book, calling for archivists to archivists embrace change and professional evolution. Sibyl Schaefer and Janet M. Bunde begin the book with an exploration of how standards facilitate intellectual control and improve access, J. Gordon Daines III examines practices and procedures for processing and providing access to digital records and manuscripts in the second section, and Daniel A. Santamaria discusses methods for making descriptive information and archival materials available online in the final section. The sections include broad discussions and detailed specifics about the topics, allowing the reader to learn more about a topic generally or narrow in on their immediate need for information

The application of workflows to digital heritage systems

Digital heritage systems usually handle a rich and varied mix of digital objects, accompanied by complex and intersecting workflows and processes. However, they usually lack effective workflow management within their components as evident in the lack of integrated solutions that include workflow components. There are a number of reasons for this limitation in workflow management utilization including some technical challenges, the unique nature of each digital resource and the challenges imposed by the environments and infrastructure in which such systems operate. This thesis investigates the concept of utilizing Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) within Digital Library Systems, and more specifically in online Digital Heritage Resources. The research work conducted involved the design and development of a novel experimental WfMS to test the viability of effective workflow management on the complex processes that exist in digital library and heritage resources. This rarely studied area of interest is covered by analyzing evolving workflow management technologies and paradigms. The different operational and technological aspects of these systems are evaluated while focusing on the areas that traditional systems often fail to address. A digital heritage resource was created to test a novel concept called DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Antiquity and Shared Heritage), which provides digital heritage content: creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction services for digital heritage collections. Based on DISPLAYS, a specific digital heritage resource was created to validate its concept and, more importantly, to act as a test bed to validate workflow management for digital heritage resources. This DISPLAYS type system implementation was called the Reanimating Cultural Heritage resource, for which three core components are the archival, retrieval and presentation components. To validate workflow management and its concepts, another limited version of these reanimating cultural heritage components was implemented within a workflow management host to test if the workflow technology is a viable choice for managing control and dataflow within a digital heritage system: this was successfully proved

Lepidoptera Collection Curation and Data Management

The collections of Lepidoptera often serve as foundational basis for a wide range of biological, ecological, and climate science disciplines. Species identification and higher taxa delimitation based on collection specimens and especially, on types test scientific hypotheses, provide multiple types of evidence for a broad range of users. Curation and data management approaches applied in Lepidoptera collections benefit greatly from many newly developed information techniques, which link and integrate data. Mostly attention is focused on clean verified collection and taxonomic literature mining data to obtain correct species-group and higher taxa names, as well as reliable data on the distribution of Lepidoptera and their trophic interactions. Collection creation and management became a subject of natural sciences itself. The chapter provides a historic overview on collection creation and curation together with a short discussion on collection goals and purposes. The creation of a virtual collection based on interlinked data is emphasized. Information science and data management tools became very important in Lepidoptera collection curation. The complexity of techniques and computing tools used in taxonomy and the increase in the amount of data that can be obtained by collection-based disciplines make it necessary to automate data gathering, manipulation, analysis, and visualization processes

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Managing Knowledge as Business Rules

In today’s business environment, it is a certainty that will manage to survive especially those organizations which are striving to adapt quickly and with low costs to the new demands of market competition. Knowledge represented by internal business rules of an organization can help crystallize their orientation in order to ensure a competitive advantage in the market. In this context and in a relatively short time, a new trend in software development has arisen, ex-tending current methods and putting a strong emphasis on business rules. This article outlines the importance of managing business rules in an organized manner using dedicated software products and furthermore presents a general prototype for a business rules repository.Business Rules, Management, Knowledge, Rule Engine, Repository Prototype

Interpretation of complex situations in a semantic-based surveillance framework

The integration of cognitive capabilities in computer vision systems requires both to enable high semantic expressiveness and to deal with high computational costs as large amounts of data are involved in the analysis. This contribution describes a cognitive vision system conceived to automatically provide high-level interpretations of complex real-time situations in outdoor and indoor scenarios, and to eventually maintain communication with casual end users in multiple languages. The main contributions are: (i) the design of an integrative multilevel architecture for cognitive surveillance purposes; (ii) the proposal of a coherent taxonomy of knowledge to guide the process of interpretation, which leads to the conception of a situation-based ontology; (iii) the use of situational analysis for content detection and a progressive interpretation of semantically rich scenes, by managing incomplete or uncertain knowledge, and (iv) the use of such an ontological background to enable multilingual capabilities and advanced end-user interfaces. Experimental results are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.This work was supported by the project 'CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 Multimodal interaction in pattern recognition and computer vision' (V-00069). This work is supported by EC Grants IST-027110 for the HERMES project and IST-045547 for the VIDI-video project, and by the Spanish MEC under Projects TIN2006-14606 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 (CSD2007-00018). Jordi Gonzàlez also acknowledges the support of a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish MEC.Peer Reviewe

Managing change in persistent object systems

Persistent object systems are highly-valued technology because they o er an e ec- tive foundation for building very long-lived persistent application systems (PAS). The technology becomes more e ective as it o ers a more consistently integrated computational context. For it to be feasible to design and construct a PAS it must be possible to in- crementally add program and data to the existing collection. For a PAS to endure it must o er exibility: a capacity to evolve and change. This paper examines the capacity of persistent object systems to accommodate incremental construction and change. Established store based technologies can support incremental construction but methodologies are needed to deploy them e ectively. Evolving data description is one motivation for inheritance but inheritance alone is not enough to support change management. The case for supporting incremental change is very persuasive. The challenge is to provide technologies that will facilitate it and methodologies that will organise it. This paper identi es change absorbers as a means of describing how changes should propagate. It is argued that if we systematically develop an adequate reper- toire of change absorbers then they will facilitate much better quality change man- agement