Serbia-Forum An Overview and Innovative Perspectives

Aleksandar Mihajlović Vladisav Jelisavčić Bojan Marinković Zoran Ognjanović Veljko Milutinović Hermann Maurer Mathematical Institute of 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 2/24

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 3/24

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. 9/24

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 11/24

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 commodities related to books 13/24

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 14/24

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 18/24

In Progress – Web App ABC….

Serbia-forum pages JSP Wiki

user

Serbiaforum

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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). 20/24

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 Nikola Tesla 1850 – 1860 Austro-Hungary New York, 1943

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 Sturm

Marshall 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 model throughout the Balkan region – Allowing better future integration of heritage content into the European family of heritage content, the Europeana 23/24

http://serbia-forum.org • • • • •

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

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