DIGITAL LIBRARIES: ADVANCED METHODS AND TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

The explosion of the World Wide Web and of the multimedia technology provide initial techniques for organization of digital information collections and indicate a technical framework for the libraries of the future. At the same time, Digital Libraries - complex and advanced forms of information systems - are considered as distributed repositories of knowledge. Various Digital Libraries technologies are rapidly developing. Challenges in semantics, integration of information, perception and presentation of various kinds of data call for significant innovations. Development of Digital Libraries technologies is becoming more and more essential for raising of the standards of health care, education, science and economy, as well as the quality of life on the whole. Projects devoted to generation of the digital form of the information concerning the Earth, Universe, Literature, Art, Environment and Humans, accumulated by the humanity, are examples of the intensive development of global information repositories.

The main objective of RCDL is to organize a forum bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines to present their work on enabling methods and technologies for digital libraries. The conference also provides an opportunity for scientists to consolidate a research community in Russia focusing on digital library development. The Conference offers such a community an opportunity to discuss ideas and outcomes and to make contacts for closer cooperation. The Conference also promotes the study of international experience, development of the international cooperation on Digital Libraries. In view of this, papers describing the advanced directions of research and development are welcome. Much attention will be paid to pilot applications and digital collections developed within the RFBR projects on Digital Libraries and other programmes.

RCDL is open for the international participation

The Conference topics include but are not limited to:

• methods and tools leading to wide-spectrum information discovery, search, retrieval, manipulation
• information querying, presentation and visualization
• theories and models for semantic search and retrieval
• multilingual information access and cross-lingual data services
• intelligent analysis, search and classification of text/image/video types by content and structure
• natural language analysis for data extraction, structure and topical segmentation, linguistic support, ontologies, thesauri, indexing
• advanced multimedia information capture, representation and digitization
• intelligent user interfaces, agents to support human needs
• heterogeneous digital collection (content) interoperability
• metadata objectives, types, standards; metadata and information content
• social science research and humanities research applied to distributed digital information environments
• legal and security issues associated with the creation and use of digital collections
• open, networked architectures for digital information environments, relevant standards development
• testbeds and digital collections (new (original) types of digital collections for science, education and culture, new means for establishing relationships among knowledge sources, metadata, interoperation interfaces).

RCDL series of conferences have been initiated in December 1998with a seminar "DIGITAL LIBRARIES: ADVANCED METHODS AND TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITAL COLLECTIONS" organized by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research in frame of its Program "Digital Libraries".