In this talk we will focus on TELDAP, which stands for Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program, and give an account of how this project was conceived, and eventually evolved into what it stands today.

The upshot is that TELDAP not only preserves Chinese culture, but also showcases Taiwan ’s cultural, socio- and bio-diversity. It represents a national effort, led by Academia Sinica, involving many government institutions, the general public, as well as many content experts and software engineers.

A variety of databases, metadata standards for various types of digital content, and special technologies for Chinese character processing, multimedia processing, information retrieval in spatial and time domains, etc. have been developed. These databases were distributed at institutions but were organized into a unified framework for public access.

We will demonstrate the project, present the lessons learned, and show how this project brings our culture heritage from institutes to the general public, integrating it into their daily lives. We hope TELDAP will sustain itself as an evidence of national effort towards open data movement.