Multimedia database of the cultural heritage of the Balkans

This paper presents a system that is designed to make possible the organization and search within the collected digitized material of intangible cultural heritage. The motivation for building the system was a vast quantity of multimedia documents collected by a team from the Institute for Balkan Studies in Belgrade. The main topic of their research were linguistic properties of speeches that are used in various places in the Balkans by different groups of people. This paper deals with a prototype system that enables the annotation of the collected material and its organization into a native XML database through a graphical interface. The system enables the search of the database and the presentation of digitized multimedia documents and spatial as well as non-spatial information of the queried data. The multimedia content can be read, listened to or watched while spatial properties are presented on the graphics that consists of geographic regions in the Balkans. The system also enables spatial queries by consulting the graph of geographic regions.