Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium and the Need for a Common Standards in Technology and Procedure for Digitization and Archiving Faridah Noor

Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium and the Need for a

Common Standards in Technology and Procedure for Digitization and

Archiving

Faridah Noor Mohd NoorFaculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya

Convener, Asian Digital Heritage Exchange (DHX) Consortium, Co-Chair, e-Culture WG, APAN

Convener, e-Culture BoF, MYREN

Suhaimi NapisCIO and Director, InfoComm Development and Computer Centre,

Universiti Putra MalaysiaDirector, E-Research Area, MYREN

2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

Apologies

Dr. Faridah Noor would like to thank the Chairman of Global Collaboration WG of this 23rd APAN Meeting and sends her apologies for not being able to attend this important meeting as she is currently a Visiting Professor at Free University, Berlin under FES research fellowship


OUTLINE

Introduction to Culture and Heritage: UNESCO

Report on Asian DHX Forum 2006 Discussion on the formation of Asian Digital

Heritage Exchange Consortium Issues and Challenges for future Global

Collaboration


Digital Heritage: UNESCO Definition

Unique resources of human knowledge and expression

It embraces cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical, and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources

Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage: Adopted during 32nd Session, 2003


Digital Heritage: The Need to Preserve and Archive

Ensure accessibility to the public Access should be free of unreasonable

restrictions especially public domain digital heritage materials

Provision of legal and practical environment that will maximise accesibility

Rapid obsolescense of hardware and software

Changes in attitude and political situation


Asian Digital Heritage Forum

Initiative of Ministry of Information and Communication, Korea and Korea Information Society Development Institute

Asian DHX Forum 2004, 2005 and 2006 aimed at giving opportunity to share the progress in digitalizing cultural heritage contents, explore how to further facilitate such activities and seek a cooperative scheme between technology and culture.

In 2006 (last in the series due to funding constraint) managed to put up a foundation on cooperation between Technology and Humanities by forming Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium and held its inaugural Protem Executive Committee Meeting.


Asian DHX Forum 2006

Keynotes Speeches Digital Bayon Project (K. Ikeuchi, University of Tokyo) Cultural Heritage Data Exchange: Reference

Technology for Digital Material (Lewis Lancaster, ECAI, USA)

Digital Heritage as an Academic Discipline (Kwangyun Wohn, KAIST, Korea



Session 1: Technical Session Digital Restorology; Hwangryongsa and Angkor Wat (Jinho Park,

KAIST, Korea) The Development of Wat Makutkasattriyaram e-Museum (R.

Suwannakanthi, NECTEC, Thailand) Mobilizing Asian Cooperation for Asian Digital Heritage and

Exchange (Faridah Noor, Universiti Malaya) Korea-EU Cooperation Project for Tangible Virtual Museum (Yong-

Moo Kwon, KIST, Korea) Activities on Humanities e-Culture through UNESCO (Kwon Huh,

Korea) Designing a Virtual Heritage Entertainment Applicationfor

Interactive Education (Soyon Park, Jeonju University, Korea)



Session 2: Humanities e-Culture Session Digital Korean Culture Heritage Content Project (Chu, Chin Oh,

Sangyung University, Korea) Open Access to Cultural Information: A Perspective from APAN e-

Culture (Y. Sato, Mie University, Japan) Vietnam Works on e-Culture (Nguyen Hai Ninh, Ministry of Culture

and Information, Vietnam) Cultural Heritage on GIS (Seungyong Uhm, Cultural Heritage

Administration, Korea)


Panel Discussion: Issues and Motivations

Digital Heritage up till now put too much emphasis on technology and not so much on humanities and social science (technology driven)

Need to revisit Digital Heritage Issue Raised many questions on humanities in Digital

Heritage What is the research objective? What is the spirit inside Cultural Heritage? What are the stories/history for Digital Heritage? How to share and represent Digital Heritage?


Issues and Motivations (cont…)

Meeting of different cultures require Mutual Understanding Humanities is more important but how technology can

facilitate? Preservation and Archiving of Digital Information

Perspective from both sides on methodologies on technology (laser scanning, rendering, etc) as well as humanities (field surveys, awareness, etc)

Issues on Standards to represent Digital Heritage Metadata techniques and tools Heritage Ontology, etc.


Awareness and Cooperation:

Issues and Challenges

General lack of awareness Some countries lack the awareness to preserve and

archive cultural heritage because of more pressing economic and political issues

Disparity in computer and technical knowledge and expertise Culture-rich Asian nations lack the technological

expertise and funding to digitize culture Hence, a transfer of technology to assist these

countries is deemed necessary before their rich cultural heritage is forever lost and forgotten


Best Practices and Processes

Several Asian countries including Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, and others are well advanced in Digital Heritage Initiatives

Best practices and processes are already in place

Invaluable experiences to deal with policy-makers and stakeholders; especially the custodian of culture - the people/community themselves


Some technical Issues…

Capturing 3D motion data is laborious and very time-consuming especially in the data cleaning process; many man-hours

The same goes for the 3D digitization of masks (or other artifacts)

Rendering takes a long time!!! Need to have more powerful computers

Archiving and storage standard Search and retrieval technology for audio and

video files


Available Technologies and Facilities

Technologies to identify, capture/digitalise, annotate, archive and share are available

Scattered all over Asian countries: Sharing of common facilities is possible as equipments are expensive

Sometimes, we do not even know what we have…

Global Collaboration through Advanced Network and GRID technology can play the key role to make this a reality


Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium

Formed with the aim at addressing issues and challenges raised

Some activities have been proposed during the inaugural Protem Committee Meeting of Asian DHX Consortium held in Seoul, October 16, 2006


Promoting Closer Cooperation among Asian Countries: Suggestions

Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium Local chapters/associations in participating nations

Appreciation of cultures through the eyes of the “culture shareholders” One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

Sharing of content development processes and promoting the sharing of a digital repository Stock taking of content and technology


Promoting Closer Cooperation among Asian Countries: Suggestions (cont…)

Exchange of technology engineers and implementation strategies Content owner and technology owner partnership

A pledge by richer nations to set up a Digital Heritage Fund Negotiations among willing and participating

nations

3D Rapid Digitizer

Motion Capture Facility

Capturing 3D Motion Data

3D Body Scanner

Live Cyberperformance Malaysia-Vietnam over TEIN2

Cyberperformance Showcase


Setting up of Virtual Community of Practice (COP) for Asian DHX Consortium

Discussion group to facilitate collaborative activities:

Membership drive to join in the discussion

http://dgroups.org/groups/ASIANDHX/


Conclusion

Emerging interest and awareness of the need to preserve Asian cultures call for the cultures of all individual nations to be treated as one single Asian Heritage

Responsibilities in protecting and archiving the Asian heritage must then be

a collective responsibility

Asian DHX Consortium Protem Committee


Thanks!

[email protected]

Documents

Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium and the Need for a Common Standards in Technology and Procedure for Digitization and Archiving Faridah Noor