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Serbia-ForumAn Overview and Innovative Perspectives
Aleksandar MihajlovićVladisav JelisavčićBojan MarinkovićZoran OgnjanovićVeljko MilutinovićHermann Maurer
Mathematical Instituteof the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences
Knez Mihailova 36, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
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What is Serbia-Forum?
• Two characteristics– Credible encyclopedic articles,
written by credible authors (similar to the already present e-encyclopedias)
– Digitalization of cultural and national heritage• Books
• Archived documents
• Images of culturally significant Serbian works of Art
• 3D scanning of culturally significant places– Churches
– Monasteries
– Museums
– Homes of famous Serbians
• Etc
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Motivation:
Why Serbia-Forum?
• Research– Semantic searching
• Improved semantic text and novel image searching
• Presence– Credible source of information
about cultural heritage of Serbia
– Free, centralized, and easily accessible
• Preservation– Prolong the life of articles of cultural heritage
for the generations to come
– Backup of historically and culturally significant documents• Natural disasters
• War
• Examples on the next slide
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Motivation for Digitization
• Why is “Preservation” a top priority?
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What is Serbia-Forum?
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What is Serbia-Forum?
• Based on the Austria Forum model
• Developed by Professor Dr. Hermann Maurer
at the TU Graz in Austria
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Austria-Forum:
Key Goals
(1) Information must be semantically searchable,
by metadata (both, in Forum, and via Google).
• We are searching for someone
whose name we don‘t know,
but we know he was born in Vienna (Wien),
was working in physics (Physik),
and died in Italy (Italien).
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What is Austria-Forum?
Key Goals
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Austria-Forum:
Key Goals
(2) Author Visibility:
The source of the text must be always known!
– Either the name of the author including CV,
or the book/archive it comes from!
(3) Evolution Tracking
– Updating is dangerous:
– It destroys previous information and hence history.
• When, e.g. an old building is „updated“ (renovated),
one cannot experience what it was like before.
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Austria-Forum:
Key Goals
(4) Books are not just a source of information!
– Web books behave like printed books
but also offer some new functions:
links, bookmarks, …
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What is Serbia-Forum?
Fori in the works:
(1) Academia Europaea, fully operational!(2) Germany(3) Holland(4) England(5) Portugal(6) Italy(7) Spain(8) Slovenia(9) Serbia(10) Montenegro, maybe
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Serbia-Forum: Axioms
• Axioms holding Serbia-Forum together
–Secondary
–Primary
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Serbia-Forum: Axioms
• Axioms holding Serbia-Forum together
– Secondary axioms (implementable by other projects):
1) Semantic search
2) Version tracking
of every document
3) Author visibility,
Information about the author
of each document is supplied
i.e. biography.
4) Original commoditiesrelated to books
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Serbia-Forum: Axioms
• Axioms holding Serbia-Forum together
– Primary axioms (fixed to the serbia-forum project):
1) Content is selected and controlled
by government funded and owned
cultural and academic institutions
2) Each document can be copy protected
by a different license (not only CC)
3) Quality NOT quantity
4) Possible semantic culture-oriented translation
into a number of relevant foreign languages
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Progress Report - Partners
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Progress Report - Resources
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Progress Report - Digitalization
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Progress Report – Content
• Currently the most active content contributor
to Serbia Forum is the National Library of Serbia
(NBS)
• Over 2 million pages of scanned content donated
• Restructuring of the national library web site in progress by the Serbia Forum team
• National Archive of Serbia
• Volumes of census documents from the last two centuries
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In Progress – Web App
<input> ABC….
</input>
JSP Wiki
Serbia-
forum
Serbia-forum pages
user
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In Progress – Meta Data
and Semantic Searching
• Development of a new NCD metadata standard that will be used for Serbia Forum and all other upcoming fori
• This will be performed in accordance to an XML data base that will be appended to the original model of the Austria-Forum web application
• Development of new and dynamic semantic searching and indexing algorithms (detailed discussion in upcoming journal papers).
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In Progress – Meta Data
and Semantic Searching
• Semantic indexing of content (1/2)
– Smart text content searching (Austria-Forum)
• Broad search queries lead to specific results
1850 – 1860
Austro-Hungary
New York, 1943
Nikola Tesla
Born 1856 in
Austro-Hungary
Died in New York
City in 1943
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In Progress – Meta Data
and Semantic Searching• Semantic indexing of content (2/2)
– Smart image content searching
(Goal of Serbia-Forum)
• Correlating an image to similar images
General Pavle
Jurišić SturmMarshall Josip
Broz Tito
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Other Goals
• Reaching national minorities in Serbia and unveiling their cultural heritage– Jewish
– Islamic Bosniaks
– Vojvodina Hungarians
– Albanians in the Preševo valley
– Etc.
• Disseminating the forum modelthroughout the Balkan region– Allowing better future integration
of heritage content into the European family of heritage content, the Europeana
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http://serbia-forum.org