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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

• mihajlovic@mi.sanu.ac.rs

• vladisavj@gmail.com

• zorano@mi.sanu.ac.rs

• bojanm@mi.sanu.ac.rs

• vm@etf.rs