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Author |
Jon Almazan |

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Title |
Learning to Represent Handwritten Shapes and Words for Matching and Recognition |
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2014 |
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PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC |
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Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and for centuries, handwriting had been the most reliable way to preserve knowledge. However, despite the recent development of printing houses and electronic devices, handwriting is still broadly used for taking notes, doing annotations, or sketching ideas.
Transferring the ability of understanding handwritten text or recognizing handwritten shapes to computers has been the goal of many researches due to its huge importance for many different fields. However, designing good representations to deal with handwritten shapes, e.g. symbols or words, is a very challenging problem due to the large variability of these kinds of shapes. One of the consequences of working with handwritten shapes is that we need representations to be robust, i.e., able to adapt to large intra-class variability. We need representations to be discriminative, i.e., able to learn what are the differences between classes. And, we need representations to be efficient, i.e., able to be rapidly computed and compared. Unfortunately, current techniques of handwritten shape representation for matching and recognition do not fulfill some or all of these requirements.
Through this thesis we focus on the problem of learning to represent handwritten shapes aimed at retrieval and recognition tasks. Concretely, on the first part of the thesis, we focus on the general problem of representing any kind of handwritten shape. We first present a novel shape descriptor based on a deformable grid that deals with large deformations by adapting to the shape and where the cells of the grid can be used to extract different features. Then, we propose to use this descriptor to learn statistical models, based on the Active Appearance Model, that jointly learns the variability in structure and texture of a given class. Then, on the second part, we focus on a concrete application, the problem of representing handwritten words, for the tasks of word spotting, where the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images, and recognition. First, we address the segmentation-free problem and propose an unsupervised, sliding-window-based approach that achieves state-of- the-art results in two public datasets. Second, we address the more challenging multi-writer problem, where the variability in words exponentially increases. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace, and where those that represent the same word are close together. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. This leads to a low-dimensional, unified representation of word images and strings, resulting in a method that allows one to perform either image and text searches, as well as image transcription, in a unified framework. We evaluate our methods on different public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks. |
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Ph.D. thesis |
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Ediciones Graficas Rey |
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Ernest Valveny;Alicia Fornes |
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DAG; 600.077 |
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Admin @ si @ Alm2014 |
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2572 |
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Author |
David Fernandez |

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Title |
Contextual Word Spotting in Historical Handwritten Documents |
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2014 |
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PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC |
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There are countless collections of historical documents in archives and libraries that contain plenty of valuable information for historians and researchers. The extraction of this information has become a central task among the Document Analysis researches and practitioners.
There is an increasing interest to digital preserve and provide access to these kind of documents. But only the digitalization is not enough for the researchers. The extraction and/or indexation of information of this documents has had an increased interest among researchers. In many cases, and in particular in historical manuscripts, the full transcription of these documents is extremely dicult due the inherent deciencies: poor physical preservation, dierent writing styles, obsolete languages, etc. Word spotting has become a popular an ecient alternative to full transcription. It inherently involves a high level of degradation in the images. The search of words is holistically
formulated as a visual search of a given query shape in a larger image, instead of recognising the input text and searching the query word with an ascii string comparison. But the performance of classical word spotting approaches depend on the degradation level of the images being unacceptable in many cases . In this thesis we have proposed a novel paradigm called contextual word spotting method that uses the contextual/semantic information to achieve acceptable results whereas classical word spotting does not reach. The contextual word spotting framework proposed in this thesis is a segmentation-based word spotting approach, so an ecient word segmentation is needed. Historical handwritten
documents present some common diculties that can increase the diculties the extraction of the words. We have proposed a line segmentation approach that formulates the problem as nding the central part path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A path nding algorithm is used to nd the optimal path in a graph, previously computed, between the text lines. Once the text lines are extracted, words are localized inside the text lines using a word segmentation technique from the state of the
art. Classical word spotting approaches can be improved using the contextual information of the documents. We have introduced a new framework, oriented to handwritten documents that present a highly structure, to extract information making use of context. The framework is an ecient tool for semi-automatic transcription that uses the contextual information to achieve better results than classical word spotting approaches. The contextual information is
automatically discovered by recognizing repetitive structures and categorizing all the words according to semantic classes. The most frequent words in each semantic cluster are extracted and the same text is used to transcribe all them. The experimental results achieved in this thesis outperform classical word spotting approaches demonstrating the suitability of the proposed ensemble architecture for spotting words in historical handwritten documents using contextual information. |
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Ph.D. thesis |
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Ediciones Graficas Rey |
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Josep Llados;Alicia Fornes |
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978-84-940902-7-1 |
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DAG; 600.077 |
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Admin @ si @ Fer2014 |
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2573 |
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Author |
Lluis Pere de las Heras |

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Title |
Relational Models for Visual Understanding of Graphical Documents. Application to Architectural Drawings. |
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2014 |
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PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC |
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Graphical documents express complex concepts using a visual language. This language consists of a vocabulary (symbols) and a syntax (structural relations between symbols) that articulate a semantic meaning in a certain context. Therefore, the automatic interpretation by computers of these sort of documents entails three main steps: the detection of the symbols, the extraction of the structural relations between these symbols, and the modeling of the knowledge that permits the extraction of the semantics. Dierent domains in graphical documents include: architectural and engineering drawings, maps, owcharts, etc.
Graphics Recognition in particular and Document Image Analysis in general are
born from the industrial need of interpreting a massive amount of digitalized documents after the emergence of the scanner. Although many years have passed, the graphical document understanding problem still seems to be far from being solved. The main reason is that the vast majority of the systems in the literature focus on very specic problems, where the domain of the document dictates the implementation of the interpretation. As a result, it is dicult to reuse these strategies on dierent data and on dierent contexts, hindering thus the natural progress in the eld.
In this thesis, we face the graphical document understanding problem by proposing several relational models at dierent levels that are designed from a generic perspective. Firstly, we introduce three dierent strategies for the detection of symbols. The first method tackles the problem structurally, wherein general knowledge of the domain guides the detection. The second is a statistical method that learns the graphical appearance of the symbols and easily adapts to the big variability of the problem. The third method is a combination of the previous two methods that inherits their respective strengths, i.e. copes the big variability and does not need annotated data. Secondly, we present two relational strategies that tackle the problem of the visual context extraction. The first one is a full bottom up method that heuristically searches in a graph representation the contextual relations between symbols. Contrarily, the second is syntactic method that models probabilistically the structure of the documents. It automatically learns the model, which guides the inference algorithm to encounter the best structural representation for a given input. Finally, we construct a knowledge-based model consisting of an ontological denition of the domain and real data. This model permits to perform contextual reasoning and to detect semantic inconsistencies within the data. We evaluate the suitability of the proposed contributions in the framework of floor plan interpretation. Since there is no standard in the modeling of these documents there exists an enormous notation variability from plan to plan in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Therefore, floor plan interpretation is a relevant task in the graphical document understanding problem. It is also worth to mention that we make freely available all the resources used in this thesis {the data, the tool used to generate the data, and the evaluation scripts{ with the aim of fostering research in the graphical document understanding task. |
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Ph.D. thesis |
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Ediciones Graficas Rey |
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Gemma Sanchez |
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978-84-940902-8-8 |
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DAG; 600.077 |
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Admin @ si @ Her2014 |
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2574 |
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Author |
Hongxing Gao |

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Title |
Focused Structural Document Image Retrieval in Digital Mailroom Applications |
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2015 |
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PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC |
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In this work, we develop a generic framework that is able to handle the document retrieval problem in various scenarios such as searching for full page matches or retrieving the counterparts for specific document areas, focusing on their structural similarity or letting their visual resemblance to play a dominant role. Based on the spatial indexing technique, we propose to search for matches of local key-region pairs carrying both structural and visual information from the collection while a scheme allowing to adjust the relative contribution of structural and visual similarity is presented.
Based on the fact that the structure of documents is tightly linked with the distance among their elements, we firstly introduce an efficient detector named Distance Transform based Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (DTMSER). We illustrate that this detector is able to efficiently extract the structure of a document image as a dendrogram (hierarchical tree) of multi-scale key-regions that roughly correspond to letters, words and paragraphs. We demonstrate that, without benefiting from the structure information, the key-regions extracted by the DTMSER algorithm achieve better results comparing with state-of-the-art methods while much less amount of key-regions are employed.
We subsequently propose a pair-wise Bag of Words (BoW) framework to efficiently embed the explicit structure extracted by the DTMSER algorithm. We represent each document as a list of key-region pairs that correspond to the edges in the dendrogram where inclusion relationship is encoded. By employing those structural key-region pairs as the pooling elements for generating the histogram of features, the proposed method is able to encode the explicit inclusion relations into a BoW representation. The experimental results illustrate that the pair-wise BoW, powered by the embedded structural information, achieves remarkable improvement over the conventional BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW methods.
To handle various retrieval scenarios in one framework, we propose to directly query a series of key-region pairs, carrying both structure and visual information, from the collection. We introduce the spatial indexing techniques to the document retrieval community to speed up the structural relationship computation for key-region pairs. We firstly test the proposed framework in a full page retrieval scenario where structurally similar matches are expected. In this case, the pair-wise querying method achieves notable improvement over the BoW and spatial pyramidal BoW frameworks. Furthermore, we illustrate that the proposed method is also able to handle focused retrieval situations where the queries are defined as a specific interesting partial areas of the images. We examine our method on two types of focused queries: structure-focused and exact queries. The experimental results show that, the proposed generic framework obtains nearly perfect precision on both types of focused queries while it is the first framework able to tackle structure-focused queries, setting a new state of the art in the field.
Besides, we introduce a line verification method to check the spatial consistency among the matched key-region pairs. We propose a computationally efficient version of line verification through a two step implementation. We first compute tentative localizations of the query and subsequently employ them to divide the matched key-region pairs into several groups, then line verification is performed within each group while more precise bounding boxes are computed. We demonstrate that, comparing with the standard approach (based on RANSAC), the line verification proposed generally achieves much higher recall with slight loss on precision on specific queries. |
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January 2015 |
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Ph.D. thesis |
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Ediciones Graficas Rey |
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Josep Llados;Dimosthenis Karatzas;Marçal Rusiñol |
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978-84-943427-0-7 |
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DAG; 600.077 |
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Admin @ si @ Gao2015 |
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2577 |
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Author |
Lluis Pere de las Heras; David Fernandez; Alicia Fornes; Ernest Valveny; Gemma Sanchez; Josep Llados |

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Title |
Runlength Histogram Image Signature for Perceptual Retrieval of Architectural Floor Plans |
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2013 |
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10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition |
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Bethlehem; PA; USA; August 2013 |
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GREC |
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DAG; 600.045; 600.061; 600.056 |
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Admin @ si @ HFF2013b |
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2695 |
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Author |
Lluis Pere de las Heras; Ernest Valveny; Gemma Sanchez |

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Unsupervised and Notation-Independent Wall Segmentation in Floor Plans Using a Combination of Statistical and Structural Strategies |
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2013 |
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10th IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition |
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Bethlehem; PA; USA; August 2013 |
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GREC |
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DAG |
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Admin @ si @ HVS2013b |
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2696 |
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Carlos David Martinez Hinarejos; Josep Llados; Alicia Fornes; Francisco Casacuberta; Lluis de Las Heras; Joan Mas; Moises Pastor; Oriol Ramos Terrades; Joan Andreu Sanchez; Enrique Vidal; Fernando Vilariño |

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Title |
Context, multimodality, and user collaboration in handwritten text processing: the CoMUN-HaT project |
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Conference Article |
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2016 |
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3rd IberSPEECH |
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Processing of handwritten documents is a task that is of wide interest for many
purposes, such as those related to preserve cultural heritage. Handwritten text recognition techniques have been successfully applied during the last decade to obtain transcriptions of handwritten documents, and keyword spotting techniques have been applied for searching specific terms in image collections of handwritten documents. However, results on transcription and indexing are far from perfect. In this framework, the use of new data sources arises as a new paradigm that will allow for a better transcription and indexing of handwritten documents. Three main different data sources could be considered: context of the document (style, writer, historical time, topics,. . . ), multimodal data (representations of the document in a different modality, such as the speech signal of the dictation of the text), and user feedback (corrections, amendments,. . . ). The CoMUN-HaT project aims at the integration of these different data sources into the transcription and indexing task for handwritten documents: the use of context derived from the analysis of the documents, how multimodality can aid the recognition process to obtain more accurate transcriptions (including transcription in a modern version of the language), and integration into a userin-the-loop assisted text transcription framework. This will be reflected in the construction of a transcription and indexing platform that can be used by both professional and nonprofessional users, contributing to crowd-sourcing activities to preserve cultural heritage and to obtain an accessible version of the involved corpus. |
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Lisboa; Portugal; November 2016 |
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IberSPEECH |
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DAG; MV; 600.097;SIAI |
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Admin @ si @MLF2016 |
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2813 |
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Author |
Marçal Rusiñol; J. Chazalon; Jean-Marc Ogier |

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Title |
Filtrage de descripteurs locaux pour l'amélioration de la détection de documents |
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2016 |
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Colloque International Francophone sur l'Écrit et le Document |
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Local descriptors; mobile capture; document matching; keypoint selection |
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In this paper we propose an effective method aimed at reducing the amount of local descriptors to be indexed in a document matching framework.In an off-line training stage, the matching between the model document and incoming images is computed retaining the local descriptors from the model that steadily produce good matches. We have evaluated this approach by using the ICDAR2015 SmartDOC dataset containing near 25000 images from documents to be captured by a mobile device. We have tested the performance of this filtering step by using ORB and SIFT local detectors and descriptors. The results show an important gain both in quality of the final matching as well as in time and space requirements. |
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Toulouse; France; March 2016 |
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CIFED |
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DAG; 600.084; 600.077 |
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Admin @ si @ RCO2016 |
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2755 |
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Author |
Y. Patel; Lluis Gomez; Marçal Rusiñol; Dimosthenis Karatzas |

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Dynamic Lexicon Generation for Natural Scene Images |
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2016 |
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14th European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops |
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395-410 |
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scene text; photo OCR; scene understanding; lexicon generation; topic modeling; CNN |
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Many scene text understanding methods approach the endtoend recognition problem from a word-spotting perspective and take huge benet from using small per-image lexicons. Such customized lexicons are normally assumed as given and their source is rarely discussed.
In this paper we propose a method that generates contextualized lexicons
for scene images using only visual information. For this, we exploit
the correlation between visual and textual information in a dataset consisting
of images and textual content associated with them. Using the topic modeling framework to discover a set of latent topics in such a dataset allows us to re-rank a xed dictionary in a way that prioritizes the words that are more likely to appear in a given image. Moreover, we train a CNN that is able to reproduce those word rankings but using only the image raw pixels as input. We demonstrate that the quality of the automatically obtained custom lexicons is superior to a generic frequency-based baseline. |
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Amsterdam; The Netherlands; October 2016 |
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ECCVW |
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DAG; 600.084 |
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Admin @ si @ PGR2016 |
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2825 |
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Author |
Fernando Vilariño; Dimosthenis Karatzas |

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The Library Living Lab |
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2015 |
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Open Living Lab Days |
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Istanbul; Turkey; August 2015 |
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OLLD |
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MV; DAG;SIAI |
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Admin @ si @ViK2015 |
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2797 |
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