Luciana Bordoni

The role of the library in a new learning scenario

Distance learning can be defined, in the most general terms, as a method of education that involves an instructor and student(s), who are separated geographically and must rely on one or more methods of long‐distance communication. It is the direct descendant of correspondence and home study courses, that were developed in the nineteenth century. What is new, however, is the wealth of telecommunications and telematics options available today that enable the provision of this high‐tech educational environment and the enlargement of the potential user base. Libraries have a central role in education, learning, and vocational training in support of increasing knowledge. The rapid evolution of information and communication technology in the learning field imposes, supports and stimulates the re‐engineering of the library. This paper provides a description of a new distance learning scenario in a library service.

Technologies to support cultural tourism for Latin Latium

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show the validity of the advanced technologies of computer science and propose the outline of a technological infrastructure to promote, develop, and exploit cultural tourism, taking the territory of Latin Latium as a local system.Design/methodology/approach – Semantic web technologies offering intelligent integration of information about the region and heritage of Latin Latium are used. The information includes all kinds of cultural heritage, from bibliographic items to industrial assets, or prehistoric excavations in this region. A cultural heritage ontology has to be designed, constructed, fed, and exploited in order to achieve this aim. A methodology for the ontology population and exploitation for other regions of Italy or even outside Italy is proposed. The network of skills and knowledge thus created, provides features of interest for other types of users, such as experts, scholars, and students, in addition to acting on the cultural tourism market.Findings...

Library’s unified information system and advanced library services

In this work are described some concepts concerning the creation of a library’s unified network and its unified information system, based on innovative technologies for the distribution of the largest number of advanced services to an increasing number of users. Initially, we explain the functions which characterise a unified network, describing the different levels of interoperability and application cooperation services needed to realize the library’s unified information system. The basic elements of the network architecture have been considered from the functional point of view, taking them from the distribution system’s architectures. At the end, some of the advanced systems to be used through the library’s unified network are exposed and discussed; among them, the information filtering system, the digital library, and the distance learning and educational services.

The contribution of AI to enhance understanding of Cultural Heritage

The Artificial Intelligence & Cultural Heritage (AI & CH) working group was born in 1999 with the aim at promoting various scientific activities to increase a more active collaboration between the sectors of cultural assets and artificial intelligence. The many events (workshops and schools) organized over the years have shown the validity of this group for exchanging ideas and gathering researchers and practitioners from different fields. New applications of informatics and artificial intelligence have provided the opportunity to produce innovative tools for documenting, managing and communicating cultural heritage. For this anniversary we intend to show how some of the most important methods and techniques of artificial intelligence developed in this area, still represent significant tools for preservation, archiving and fruition of cultural heritage. In the following the contributions of Italian researchers involved for several years in projects related to cultural heritage, will be presented.

A Data-Compression Approach to the Monolingual GIRT Task: An Agnostic Point of View

In this paper we apply a data-compression IR method in the GIRT social science database, focusing on the monolingual task in German and English. For this purpose we use a recently proposed general scheme for context recognition and context classification of strings of characters (in particular texts) or other coded information. The key point of the method is the computation of a suitable measure of remoteness (or similarity) between two strings of characters. This measure of remoteness reflects the distance between the structures present in the two strings, i.e. between the two different distributions of elements of the compared sequences. The hypothesis is that the information-theory oriented measure of remoteness between two sequences could reflect their semantic distance. It is worth stressing the generality and versatility of our information-theoretic method which applies to any kind of corpora of character strings, whatever the type of coding used (i.e. language).

A multimedia personalized fruition of figurative artistic heritage by a GIS-based methodology

The creation of a personalized classification of figurative heritage is examined. The subjectivity and the variability in time are the essential elements for a personalized classification of works of art. The aim is thus to make the application available to as many users as possible by creating a low-cost, PC application for managing a personal archive of works of art. We propose a methodology to construct a multimedia system that allows users to classify an image according to personal criteria. The methodology we propose makes it possible to build a multimedia GIS-based tool that allows users to create a personalized application. Suggestions about potential applications of the proposed methodology, in particular for teachers and art-lovers, are discussed and some examples are also presented.

An application of reduce to industrial mechanics

A REDUCE implementation of a method to obtain dynamical equations of motion for large mechanical systems is presented. These equations of motion are obtained by the Lagrange dynamical equations.

Artificial intelligence for cultural heritage and digital libraries

Computer science and communication networks have become tools for scientists of humanistic science. The new challenge of computer science is actually to provide scientists and cultural heritage researchers with effective tools for data analysis in order to make easy the enjoyment and the study of cultural heritage and to promote digital heritage and cultural content accessible through archives, museums, and libraries. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) offers a variety of principles, techniques, methods, systems, and tools to build and to make available effective digital libraries to endusers. Integration of methods, services, systems, and interoperability across different data structures, metadata, and components are key issues that should be addressed by the scientific community. Furthermore, advanced methods for managing information needs of users enable the implementation of collaborative information agents, which

COVAX: A Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML

The objectives of the EU-funded COVAX project are: ? to build a web service for search and retrieval of contemporary European cultural documents from memory institutions. ? to make existing library, archive and museum document descriptions accessible over the Internet. ? to assist memory institutions to provide access to their collections, regardless of document type or collection size. ? to implement standards and achieve interoperability between retrieval systems operating in the cultural heritage area.Partners in the project include technology developers and providers (public research organizations and private companies) and content owners (memory institutions). The content owners have collections of varying type and size, catalogued using a variety of library, museum and archiving systems. The project is assessing ways to improve access to these collections by converting samples of existing data into a limited set of common structured formats, each of which can be expressed using XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

Xml for libraries, archives, and museums: The project covax

The purpose of COVAX is to analyze and create the technical solutions required to provide access through the Internet to homogeneously-encoded document descriptions of archive, library, and museum collections based in the application of XML. This paper describes the development of the project, and the main achievements in building an information system of distributed XML databases containing document descriptions from libraries, archives, and museums emphasizing the conversion processes needed to transform legacy data to an XML environment.