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

1. Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Consortium and the Need for a Common Standards in Technology and Procedure for Digitization and Archiving Faridah Noor Mohd Noor Faculty 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 Napis CIO and Director, InfoComm Development and Computer Centre, Universiti Putra Malaysia Director, E-Research Area, MYREN

2. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

3. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

4. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

5. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

6. 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. 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

7. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

8. Asian DHX Forum 2006 • 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) 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

9. Asian DHX Forum 2006 • 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) 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

10. 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? 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

11. 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. 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

12. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

13. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

14. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

15. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

16. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

17. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

18. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

19. 3D Rapid Digitizer

20. Motion Capture Facility

21. Capturing 3D Motion Data

22. 3D Body Scanner

23. Live Cyberperformance Malaysia-Vietnam over TEIN2

24. Cyberperformance Showcase

25. 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/ 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

26. 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 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya

27. Asian DHX Consortium Protem Committee

28. Thanks!faridahn@gmail.com 2007 Faridah Noor University of Malaya