Japanese society of 2011 has been shaken by the tremendous impact of Tohoku Earthquake. Now, what informatics can do for natural disasters? We introduce our research projects on typhoons such as Digital Typhoon and Isewan Typhoon Memories 2009, and present our preliminary report about Tohoku Earthquake project.

The purpose of Digital Silk Road Project is to digitize the cultural heritage of Silk Road, and realize information infrastructure as web sites for researchers and the general public to search, learn and enjoy. By using a new "excavation" method, what can we rediscover from cultural heritage in the digital space? We present our recent results on a new method for discovering historical ruins from digitized historical maps, the construction of Silk Road historical ruins database, and the exhibition at Toyo Bunko digital museum.

The stream of information generated from sensors and people on the earth is getting stronger. The research challenge in the future is to design the nervous system of "Digital Earth" for taking in the stream of information, integrating and processing information in the digital space, and making appropriate responses. We present the results of Digital Typhoon and Data Integration and Analysis (DIAS) as examples of database integration projects on earth environmental data.

The purpose of Digital Silk Road Project is to digitize the cultural heritage of Silk Road, and realize information infrastructure as web sites for researchers and the general public to search, learn and enjoy. What kind of information can we draw from cultural heritage in the past using a new "excavation" method in the digital space? We introduce our results such as a method for searching historical ruins using digitized historical maps, and the construction of Silk Road historical ruins database.

To offer solutions to problems related to the environment of the Earth, it is necessary to design an adaptive information infrastructure that provides earth observation and social data chosen to follow the change of the real world. For this purpose, this presentation summarizes three projects for the integration of earth environmental data -- 1) Digital Typhoon, 2) Vertical Earth, 3) Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS), and shows demonstrations focusing on how we can connect the digital Earth with the real Earth.

Digital Silk Road Project aims at improving accessibility to the cultural heritage of Silk Road by the digitization of objects, and by the construction of a Web platform in which scholars and the general public can study, learn and enjoy. An important question is - what did we discover from digitization? We will introduce the advantage of digitization and the acquisition of knowledge with a focus on Toyo Bunko Digital Archive of Rare Books and the analysis of historical maps along Silk Road.

To produce solutions to the environmental problems of the earth, it is important to construct an information infrastructure in which various earth observation data obtained from various disciplines for various purposes are integrated for usage. This presentation introduces, with demonstrations, the goal of three projects that the author has been involved in, namely 1) Digital Typhoon, 2) Vertical Earth, 3) Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS).

Digital Silk Road Project (http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/) makes the cultural heritage of Silk Roads accessible on the Website through digitization and realizes information environment in which scholars and the general public can study, learn and enjoy. The demonstration includes Toyo Bunko Digital Archive of Rare Books, the 3D reconstitution of the Citadel of Bam (Iran), browsing and utilization of old maps along Silk Road, and various types of participatory digital archive systems.

"Digital Typhoon" (http://www.digital-typhoon.org/) and "Typhoon Front" (http://front.eye.tc/) are two Websites working together as large-scale databases and participatory media specialized in typhoons. The core of "Digital Typhoon" is satellite typhoon images for 26 years since 1981, and the core of "Typhoon Front" is real-time information collected from bloggers around the world. The future of information system is discussed based on the observation of connecting large-scale databases archiving the past and participatory media capturing the present.

Digital Silk Roads Project (http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/) makes the cultural heritage of Silk Roads accessible on the Website through digitization to realize information environment in which scholars and the general public can study, learn and enjoy. The demonstration includes Toyo Bunko Digital Archive of Rare Books, the 3D reconstitution of the Citadel of Bam (Iran), overlaying old maps on Google Earth, and movies of Bamiyan (Afghanistan).

Dictionpedia is an environment for creating, exchanging, and customizing glossaries. Dictionpedia consists of (i) dictool, a tool for editing glossaries with enhanced functions such as post-order sort and entry term registration, and (ii) dicsync, a tool for synchronizing dictool with MediaWiki for the publication of edited glossaries. Dictionpedia is freely downloadable from the project’s website http://dictionpedia.ex.nii.ac.jp/.

Wiki is a widespread community site tool that allows users to freely create and edit Wiki pages on the Web browser. In this research, MediaWiki, a Wiki engine being used to run the Wikipedia and also other encyclopedia and dictionary sites, is extended to enable the writing of labeled links. This extension enables Wiki to write and manage RDF statements.

A lot of antaritc Bryophyta are being kept as a cryopreservation or as dry specimens for academic research in Japan, assuming that these specimens are valuable. It is extremely difficult to obtain the valuable type specimens for identification or academic pursuits. Digital Pictures of Bryophyta are taken with a high digital microscope and are rendered for 3D. In addition, it introduces "New generation biotechnology portal"

Digital Typhoon (http://www.digital-typhoon.org/) aims at realizing near real-time large-scale earth databases by integrating heterogeneous data streams such as imagery, text, and other earth observation data. This presentation evaluates the current system in terms of association, organization and retrieval of various data streams, and the construction and utilization of past cases contained in the databases. We also summarize the future extension of the system.

We are promoting the digital archives of the culture and the natural heritage which is on the verge of destruction or disappearance as part of a "digital Silk Road" project. The research of the digital archive of the Toyo Bunko rare book, development of a Bamiyan digital museum were conducted in cooperation with human sciences researchers. Development of the DSR portal for creation and dissemination of contents and information on "digital Silk Road Project ", and　two international symposium of Digital silk Roads, the digital archive training of a cultural heritage in Azerbaijan: one of the RADIT countries have been carried out. This exhibition reports focusing on 3-dimensional digital restoration of the destroyed ruins of Bam and ASPICO portal in a "digital Silk Road project"

We present the "Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books." We have collaboration with Toyo Bunko, or the Oriental Library, that owns rare books-- academic references, photo albums, and others known as basic references on Silk Roads. The goal of the project is to make all pages of rare books digitized and freely accessible on the Website. We also introduce a few trials for promoting research and education on Silk Road culture using the information infrastructure of digital rare books.

Digital Typhoon (http://www.digital-typhoon.org) is a Web site to help users reach multi-faceted interpretations of information through the fusion of latest typhoon news and large-scale typhoon databases. This presentation introduces the basic philosophy and the design of the system from three components (1) real-time acquisition of information, (2) databases of past cases for the foundation of interpretations, (3) an interface for information navigation.　

The Digital Silk Roads Project, conducted at NII in cooperation with UNESCO from 2001, is overviewed and major achievements of the DSR Project are presented. In addition our new approach to build the Database of Buddhist Stone caves in the Silk Road such as DUNHUANG Caves will be demonstrated. Major Achievements of the DSR Project are: ・ International Symposium for Digital Silk Roads in Tokyo 2001 and Nara 2003 ・ Digital archiving of rare books of Toyo Bunko　・ The prototype Bamiyan Virtual Museum ・ ASPCO Portal　・Southeast Asian Interactive Atlas 500-1500 C.E.　・NII Image Museum for the National Cultural Heritage Online System ・ DSR Portal and 3D-VR restoration of the Citadel of Bam　・ Seminars of Digital Silk Roads for Silk Road countries.

We introduce "Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books" that has been developed within the Digital Silk Roads Project. This presentation discusses the basic philosophy and the detail of image processing, multilingual text processing, and indexing/searching with a demonstration using the web site (http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko), freely available to anyone. We also present the application of the digital archive to research and education.　

Teachers have an important role to play in the way of improving the use of computers in the classroom. We think that getting better use of computers in classrooms should be reached progressively in two phases: in the first phase, the teacher should get familiar with information technology tools, and in a second phase, he uses them with students in the classroom. Learning implies linking to knowledge already acquired. Therefore, as teachers are learners in our study, our approach should follow structures already established and enable teachers to understand what digital environments are, using their actual way of working. Based on this consideration, our work focuses on setting up an environment close to the current teachers’ didactical tasks so that they can freely keep writing and managing their lessons. For the requirement analysis of such an environment we interviewed teachers. The poster introduces results of these interviews and current work regarding metadata for describing teacher's own card-index notes.

Bio-portal is a 3-years project to construct portal site for various biology and biotechnology related data and databases. We are planning to develop user-freindly interface for students and teachers as well as researchers.

Valuable books held by Tokyo Bunko, which is one of the five major oriental study libraries in the world, was organized into a multimedia database and made multilingually accessible from the Web. Technologies used in organizing the digital archive, including Multilingual Annotation Support System ( MASS ), are described.

What is X-informatics? What is new, and how informatics will change from the idea? The author summarizes these points with the result of projects that the author is involved in for these past few years with the aim of building large-scale image database portals on earth science data and cultural heritage data. The author also introduces research results on database navigation/ retrieval and data mining worked on those real-world databases.

NII launched the Digital Silk Roads Project in corporation with UNESCO as an international joint research project at NII in April 2001. In December 2001, the Tokyo symposium was jointly organized by NII and UNESCO. The Tokyo Declaration was issued. The second international symposium for Digital Silk Roads Project was held at Nara in December 2003. A memorandum of understanding ( MOU ) between UNESCO and NII was signed by the Director Generals of UNESCO and NII. The Digital Silk Roads Initiative Framework ( DDSRIF ) was set up under MOU to undertake a coordination mechanism for promoting the Project. Bamiyan Remains in Afghan before the blasting were archived as Bamiyan Digital Museum. Digital archiving of various historical documents in the possession of the Oriental Library ( Tokyo Bunko ) in Tokyo was carried out. An Advanced Scientific Portal for International Cooperation on the DSR ( ASPICO-DSR ) to provide the platform for collaboration of Digital Silk Roads Study was developed.

In various scientific disciplines, the construction and utilization of comprehensive and large-scale scientific databases is now recognized as one of the standard style of scientific research. This presentation focuses on this type of ""scientific research based on large-scale database infrastructure"" from the viewpoint of informatics, and gives a brief outline of our project, ""Digital Typhoon Project,"" as a case study of this research style for meteorological applications. The presentation introduces research results on ""image data mining from large-scale scientific databases"" with specific topics such as probabilistic modeling, data visualization and contentbased image retrieval, in addition to the demonstration of our system for typhoon image mining.