5.       Concluding Remark

Major important issues of NDAP include:

• Intellectual property rights

• Multi-lingual issues

• Technical Specifications and Standards, include:

• Meta-language for Documentation, such as metadata, content markup, hyperlinks and cross-reference, etc.  

• TSL Coordination

• Digitization related standards

• Cooperation and collaboration

• Create a “Public Information Systems” version of TDA

• Create an open market mechanism (B2B2C, in e-commerce term) for selling digitized files of TDA

The above issues are the major challenges to the project office of NDAP.  These issues are not independent isolated events, they usually interwoven to form more complex issues. So is the way trying to solve them. For example, in order to help addressing multi-lingual issues, all metadata sets developed are required to be bi-lingual, in Chinese and English.

In general, all our technical information will be in public domain. Although we like to share all these information with foreign friends, but most of them will be in Chinese. NDAP has already established some international relations and co-operations with some foreign organizations. TDA will be a technical compatible international database and we are looking forward to cooperating/collaborating with any project that cares cultural heritage and digitize them as sharable precious resources for all mankind.

As Internet speeds up the coming of a new civilization, the trend of shifting major media from paper to digital is unavoidable. Cultural issues are thus the utmost priority that we must face and solve with collective wisdom. NDAP provides a good start to address cultural issues in this fast and ever-changing world. International cooperation and collaboration are most welcome. We are willing to share our work with you.

Please contact us at:

         hsieh@sinica.edu.tw

Or, visit our web-site at:

        www.nado.sinica.edu.tw

Acknowledgement