PNC / ECAI Joint Meetings
October 19 - 22, 2004
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Schedule | PNC Site

Cultural Atlas Resource Development
October 19, 1600 - 1730
Room 2
Chair: Ruth Mostern, UC Merced
rmostern@ucmerced.edu

“Taiwan Buddhist Digital Archive and the Rare Books Cataloging in Dublin Core”
Aming Tu, The Chung Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
aming@chibs.edu.tw


The purpose of this report is to introduce the study and creation of the Taiwan Buddhist Digital Archive created by Ven. Huimin Bhikkhu, Prof. Yang Huinan, Dr. Charles B. Jones and Aming Tu et al. This archive contains the largest digital database in this area of study.

Buddhism in Taiwan has been neglected by the scholars for long and recently they have come to realize that Taiwan is a unique part of China with its own history and culture, and Taiwan studies has come into its own as a separate area of inquiry.
Therefore, this report will try to present the collections of the historical material related to the study of Taiwanese Buddhism from the Ming-Zheng Period and the Qing Dynasty to present, and the analyzing of the situation and development of Taiwan Buddhist history and thought throughout its history, then the digitalization of the available material.

Simultaneously, the newly finished Taiwan Buddhism documents -- mainly focus on the collections published in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial period, will be introduced. This section concentrates on the "South Seas Buddhist Association," the highest official Buddhist organization established by the Japanese Vice regal government, this journal was published for nineteen years beginning in 1922. At the same time, the Japanese colonial period rare Buddhist Texts have been found recently, the process of digitalizing the full text with XML/TEI Markup and cataloging the rare books with Dublin Core will be presented.

 
“Digital Research Collection Supporting Scholarship in American-Philippine Relations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
Carla Q. Montori, University of Michigan
cmontori@umich.edu

Purpose: This paper describes a three-year project at the University of Michigan University Library to create a digital research collection that supports scholarship in the history of the American involvement in the Philippines.

Methods: The project has converted over 3,200 monograph volumes, 2,100 photographs, and 1,000 half-tone reproductions to digital file format via scanning. The collection includes monograph titles drawn from the Library’s general collections complemented by important, rare printed and photograph image resources from the University Library Special Collections Library. Titles selected for inclusion are not widely held, either in the United States or in their country of origin; conversion to digital format makes the content freely available on a world-wide basis. Language coverage includes works in English, Spanish, Tagalog, and other indigenous languages with a focus on material published between 1870 and 1920. Special Collections staff have been particularly inclusive of items published between 1898 and 1902, to gain significant coverage of the war years in the Philippines. Selections from 1903 to 1920 emphasize Philppine and American government publications, along with monograph titles describing the war years. The bulk of the textual items in the project underwent a simple and automatic conversion process, following policies and procedures based on technical standards, guidelines, and local best practices. The digital text has been processed by optical character recognition software (OCR) and is completely searchable. Staff added page-level metadata to note pagination structure and special features to facilitate text navigation and searching. Photographs and half-tone illustrations were scanned using appropriate technology, and are described in a database to capture information about capture mechanism and content description.

Result: The project has brought together in digital format interrelated materials, preserving their information content and greatly improving access.

Conclusion: Project design and implementation can serve as a model for creating focused digital research collections.
 
“Historical Atlas of Brazilian Cities. The Capitals Cities”
Prof. Francisco da Costa, Federal University of Brazil
xicocosta@terra.es


This work is the continuation of the European Cities Multimedia Atlases (CCCB/Comunidade Européia) Project directed to the study of the urban evolution of cities with emphasis in the use of graphic and digital resources. Its general objective is the production of a thematic and graphical series of comparative syntheses that identify, in the space of the cities, the resultants of the qualitative and quantitative processes that determine and characterize its urban evolution.

In recent years studies of urban history have encompassed a great amount and variety of documentary sources. The result has been the production of a great amount of research directed toward the creation of data bases and works that describe chronologically plans, laws, reports, etc. However this development in the study of urban history did not mean a greater and better knowledge of the relations between urban and cultural factors, instruments, periods and processes.

The necessary attitude to prevent this type of compulsory “archivism” is prioritizing the verificative and comparative approaches. The first one in the direction to tie the documentary data with the same object of disciplines - the city, its culture and its time - the second as a form to understand the local urban processes as part of a regional, territorial and global urban reality.

The Atlas idea, as instrument for the study of the history of the city, necessarily suggests a type of approach that compels a critical boarding, verificative and comparative.

See our first prototype in http://www.xcosta.arq.br/atlas/Atlas.htm
 
“Towards an Integrated Monitoring System for Angkor: Applications of GIS, Remote Sensing and TimeMap for Managing World Heritage Sites”
Damian Evans, University of Sydney
evans@acl.arts.usyd.edu.au


Archaeological survey work undertaken over the last fifteen years by the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient (EFEO) and the Greater Angkor Project has changed our understanding of Angkor as a lived-in space. Using a variety of remote sensing techniques, from aerial photo interpretation to imaging radar systems, researchers have found and mapped an archaeological landscape stretching between and also far beyond the main temple complexes. Far from being just a collection of state temples and reservoirs, the built environment of ‘classical’ Angkor covered areas that are once again experiencing rapid development due to the current boom in tourism, including Siem Reap town.

This new research has been based upon the analysis of gigabytes of geospatial information as well as a large variety of ‘traditional’ scholarly resources, and has produced a number of very large and highly significant cultural datasets in its own right. The University of Sydney, in conjunction with international partners such as UNESCO, the Cambodian government and the EFEO, has just begun a five-year project to develop an Integrated Monitoring System for Angkor that will assemble these heterogeneous datasets into a single, dynamic resource within the TimeMap framework. The system will incorporate information on contemporary environment and urban growth in addition to the archaeological data, and will make the accumulated knowledge available to researchers, decision-makers and the general public through a map-based front-end.

With an emphasis on imaging radar systems and their application at Angkor, this presentation deals with some of the issues involved with the mapping of archaeological landscapes in the TimeMap system, including the integration of historical and art-historical interpretations, the problems involved in digitising a hundred years of existing French scholarship into a GIS format, and the representation of spatial, temporal and archaeological uncertainty in the ‘new maps’ of Angkor thus produced.
 
"Integration Scientific Data in Distributed Information System of Russian Academy of Sciences"
A.N.Bezdushny M.V.Kulagin V.A.Serebriakov, Center for Sientufic Telecommunications and Information Technologies of Russian Academy of Sciences
ql@ras.ru

The Russian Academy of Sciences has a telecommunication infrastructure connecting more than 400 scientific organisations distributed over the country. During the years they produced gaint amount of scientific data. The general task of the Integrated System of Information Resources of the Russian Academy of Science (ISIR RAS) is to establish a unified information space for research in the RAS. To solve the task it is necessary to solve such tasks as metadata extracting and structuring, elaborating this structured metadata. The second class of tasks that are to be solved consists of elaborating of means that support integration of information from different information systems. As integration we mean the following. Any distributed system is implied to join information that (publications, information about persons etc.). To keep this information organizations use repositories that are implemented by local systems. Generally they use different data models, way to access data etc. The information integration subsystem that is a subsystem of a distributed system has to provide the following functions of interrepository interaction:

  1. data exchange: the subsystem has to provide tools that simplify and automate data export and import;
  2. joint search: the subsystem has to provide tools for query rooting, analyzing of query results, representing these results;
  3. unified access: the subsystem has to provide a unified means to access to resources that were found independently of repositories that keep them and protocols that are used by these repositories to access the data.

In each case the number of levels used by the system can vary. It depends on goals and facilities of each local system that participates in the distributed system.

Data Model
The data model is concordant with wildly used approaches, and consists of the following.
Each information resource is kept in a repository as globally and uniquely named set of structured data (resource attributes) and possibly a content, for example one of more formats of the resource. The resource is a real or abstract information object that a user can be interested in. Each resource belongs to some resource type that fixes differences between resources and defines a set of properties that are intrinsically specific for the resources of this type independently of their connections to other resources. These connections to other resources, i.e. information that is related to different resources, is expressed by relations between resource types. This data that specify the resource is known as metadata and forms the basis for searching,
cataloguing, and interpreting resources.

The general architecture
ISIR intends to support the key mechanisms of digital libraries and corporate portals. A corporate portal serves as a mediator that directs user queries to set of services that are relevant to a given subject area and it uses open application protocols? For example, HTTP, SOAP[SOAP], Z39.50[Z39.50], SDLIP[SDLIP], LDAP[LDAP] and others.

General architecture distinguishes the following levels.
Presentation level - is responsible for the representation of information to the user and providing user data input. Components of this level have to support different interfaces with different data representation and Web interface with HTML and XML is the key one among them.
Application level - provides implementation of application operations that are necessary for users and/or program agents of the system. It is responsible for the support of the application logic of the system.
Linking level - (the level of intermediate software – mediator) is responsible for understanding service values that are supplied by the application level and services that are supplied by service providers.
Communication level - guarantees that data supplied by different providers has an uniformed representation and it generates an object representation from this data.
Data and Service providers level. - all external services that are supplied by providers according to net services profiles.