Digital Media, Informatics, and Cultural Heritage 13-4

3. An Introduction to NDAP

NDAP is a National Project authorized by the NSC and conducted by Academia Sinica. It is the fifth National Project of ROC, Taiwan. The project office is located in the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica. The Director of NDAP is Professor Kou-Shu Yang, Member of Academia Sinica.

The goals of NDAP are manifold. They are listed as follows.

Preserving national cultural collections.
Popularizing fine cultural holdings.
Strengthening cultural heritage as well as guiding cultural development.
Popularizing knowledge and Improving Information sharing.
Enhancing education and learning.
Bootstrapping cultural and value-added industries.
Improving literacy, creativity and quality of life.
Promoting International Cooperation and resource sharing

Technically speaking, there are two major goals of the digitization. First one is to apply increasing computational capacity and network bandwidth to manage and bring accessibility and usability to huge volume of distributed complex data and transforms it into information and knowledge. The second one is to create new capability to serve existing and new user communities, especially for all levels of education. In a nutshell, a content-oriented and network-based scalable multimedia information management infrastructure will be built.

The organization of NDAP is shown in Figure-1. The operation of NDAP is shown in Figure-2. In Figure-2, it is easily seen that there are 3 classes of projects in NDAP, we call them organization project, open project, and core project, respectively.

Organization projects are those carrying on by major content holders. So far, we have 9 major content holders participated in. They are: the National Palace Museum, the National Library, the Historica Sinica, the Office of Taiwan Provincial Archives, the National History Museum, the Council of Cultural Affairs, the National Museum of Natural Sciences, the National Taiwan University and the Academia Sinica.

Open projects are those selected from a set of proposals according to open RFP announcement. In 2002, we have 7 open projects for digital content creation, 5 for technical development, and 16 for various applications of digital archives. Core projects are those that will support to or build infrastructures for those organizational and open projects. For instance, there are 11 thematic groups for various content developments and these supports are come from one of our core projects. The11 thematic groups include: Zoology, Botany, Geology, Humanities, Archiving, Calligraphy and Painting, Goods, Maps, Stone and Bronze Rubbings, Rare Books, and Archeology. These thematic groups provide a mechanism to solve problems raised in digitizing collections in their areas, respectively.

The output of NDAP has a centralized database called “the Taiwan Digital Archives (TDA)”. The ancestors of NDAP had already contributed some digitized archives into the TDA. To name a few, such as: language corpus for various times and places in history, historical maps of China and Taiwan, collections of indigenous cultures in Taiwan, some contemporary historical archives of China and Taiwan (1860-1970), some nature resources of Taiwan (including all species of fishes, shell fishes and plants, partial species of insects, butterflies and birds, and some minerals), some archaeological collections and fossil collections, some collections of bronze and stone rubbings, museum collections of jade, porcelain, bronze, ancient calligraphy and painting, images of rare books, selected gazetteer documents, and some early periodic and newspapers published in Taiwan.

Fighre-2 Projects and their Operational Relations in NDAP