During the past 5 years ILSP has successfully carried out a significant number of projects related to the development of web-based applications for digital libraries and archives. This activity was well-integrated into a national effort that aimed at digitizing and making available the country’s enormous cultural content. ILSP acquired a hands-on experience of all the digitization stages, i.e. designing of procedures, cataloguing and selecting items to be digitized, preparatory work, handling of originals, digitization, storage, semantic web issues such as metadata definition and standardization as well as controlling of documentation procedures and implementation of web archives.

ILSP has been extensively involved in related activities concerning a widely dispersed range of archives such as historical, theatrical, literature and scientific ones as well as a variety of repositories such as manuscripts, books, pamphlets, music scores, newspaper clips, photographs, artifacts and everyday items, sound and video. Despite the fact that, at this first phase, national efforts were focused on the size of digital collections rather than semantic web issues, ILSP has highlighted the aspects of efficient search and retrieval as well as the semantic and ontological continuity and comparability of collections content. Drawing on its prolonged expertise in the development of tools and applications for the management of electronic resources (i.e. text corpora, lexical/conceptual resources and thesauri), ILSP has worked on the consolidation of standards, the development of authority lists and has conducted research in the area of standardized ontologies for the documentation of artifacts (CIDOC CRM).

Accomplishments so far:

• advanced retrieval scheme of scientific data and metadata of Byzantine artworks using semantic web technologies
• methodology for building a multilingual thesaurus from heterogeneous sources
• documentation software and web-based archive for theatrical content, historical documents, modern Greek dialects, and for Greek literature in 19th century

Current R&D focus:

• exploitation of Language Technology tools and applications (lexical, terminological and conceptual resources) for information extraction and metadata mapping
• exploitation of Language Technology tools and applications (lexical, terminological and conceptual resources) for the diachronic study of Greek through digital text archives
• development of a multilingual infrastructure for a common web presentation of European theatres, for sharing their archives and for showing up in Europeana
• development of a multilingual infrastructure for digitized cultural content of Medieval art of East Mediterranean
• development of LT aids for a controlled language for the documentation of cultural objects tuned to the Greek needs
• development of LT-enabled systems capable for semi-automatic information and metadata extraction from unstructured cultural data and enrichment of related ontologies