A synchronous multimedia annotation system for secure collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies

Annotating Relationships between Multiple Mixed-media Digital Objects by Extending Annotea

Annotea provides an annotation protocol to support collaborative Semantic Web-based annotation of digital resources accessible through the Web. It provides a model whereby a user may attach supplementary information to a resource or part of a resource in the form of: either a simple textual comment; a hyperlink to another web page; a local file; or a semantic tag extracted from a formal ontology and controlled vocabulary. Hence, annotations can be used to attach subjective notes, comments, rankings, queries or tags to enable semantic reasoning across web resources. More recently tabbed Browsers and specific annotation tools, allow users to view several resources (e.g., images, video, audio, text, HTML, PDF) simultaneously in order to carry out side-by-side comparisons. In such scenarios, users frequently want to be able to create and annotate a link or relationship between two or more objects or between segments within those objects. For example, a user might want to create a link between a scene in an original film and the corresponding scene in a remake and attach an annotation to that link. Based on past experiences gained from implementing Annotea within different communities in order to enable knowledge capture, this paper describes and compares alternative ways in which the Annotea Schema may be extended for the purpose of annotating links between multiple resources (or segments of resources). It concludes by identifying and recommending an optimum approach which will enhance the power, flexibility and applicability of Annotea in many domains

Synote: development of a Web-based tool for synchronized annotations

This paper discusses the development of a Web-based media annotation application named Synote, which addresses the important issue that while the whole of a multimedia resource on the Web can be easily bookmarked, searched, linked to and tagged, it is still difficult to search or associate notes or other resources with a certain part of a resource. Synote supports the creation of synchronized notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions. It is a freely available application that enables any user to make annotations in and search annotations to any fragment of a continuous multimedia resource in the most used browsers and operating systems. In the implementation, Synote categorized different media resources and synchronized them via time line. The presentation of synchronized resources makes full use of Web 2.0 AJAX technology to enrich interoperability for the user experience. Positive evaluation results about the performance, efficiency and effectiveness of Synote were returned when using it with students and teachers for a number of undergraduate courses

Annotating Relationships between Multiple Mixed-media Digital Objects by Extending Annotea

Annotea provides an annotation protocol to support collaborative Semantic Web-based annotation of digital resources accessible through the Web. It provides a model whereby a user may attach supplementary information to a resource or part of a resource in the form of: either a simple textual comment; a hyperlink to another web page; a local file; or a semantic tag extracted from a formal ontology and controlled vocabulary. Hence, annotations can be used to attach subjective notes, comments, rankings, queries or tags to enable semantic reasoning across web resources. More recently tabbed Browsers and specific annotation tools, allow users to view several resources (e.g., images, video, audio, text, HTML, PDF) simultaneously in order to carry out side-by-side comparisons. In such scenarios, users frequently want to be able to create and annotate a link or relationship between two or more objects or between segments within those objects. For example, a user might want to create a link between a scene in an original film and the corresponding scene in a remake and attach an annotation to that link. Based on past experiences gained from implementing Annotea within different communities in order to enable knowledge capture, this paper describes and compares alternative ways in which the Annotea Schema may be extended for the purpose of annotating links between multiple resources (or segments of resources). It concludes by identifying and recommending an optimum approach which will enhance the power, flexibility and applicability of Annotea in many domains

Expert driven semi-supervised elucidation tool for medical endoscopic videos

In this paper, we present a novel application for elucidating all kind of videos that require expert knowledge, e.g., sport videos, medical videos etc., focusing on endoscopic surgery and video capsule endoscopy. In the medical domain, the knowledge of experts for tagging and interpretation of videos is of high value. As a result of the stressful working environment of medical doctors, they often simply do not have time for extensive annotations. We therefore present a semi-supervised method to gather the annotations in a very easy and time saving way for the experts and we show how this information can be used later on

CASAM: Collaborative Human-machine Annotation of Multimedia.

The CASAM multimedia annotation system implements a model of cooperative annotation between a human annotator and automated components. The aim is that they work asynchronously but together. The system focuses upon the areas where automated recognition and reasoning are most effective and the user is able to work in the areas where their unique skills are required. The system’s reasoning is influenced by the annotations provided by the user and, similarly, the user can see the system’s work and modify and, implicitly, direct it. The CASAM system interacts with the user by providing a window onto the current state of annotation, and by generating requests for information which are important for the final annotation or to constrain its reasoning. The user can modify the annotation, respond to requests and also add their own annotations. The objective is that the human annotator’s time is used more effectively and that the result is an annotation that is both of higher quality and produced more quickly. This can be especially important in circumstances where the annotator has a very restricted amount of time in which to annotate the document. In this paper we describe our prototype system. We expand upon the techniques used for automatically analysing the multimedia document, for reasoning over the annotations generated and for the generation of an effective interaction with the end-user. We also present the results of evaluations undertaken with media professionals in order to validate the approach and gain feedback to drive further research

Video annotation tools

This research deals with annotations in scholarly work. Annotations have been studied by many people. A significant amount of research has shown that instead of implementing domain specific annotation applications a better approach is to develop general purpose annotation toolkits that can be used to create domain specific applications. A video annotation toolkit along with toolkits for searching, retrieving, analyzing and presenting videos can help achieve the broader goal of creating integrated work spaces for scholarly work in humanities research similar to existing environments in such fields as mathematics, engineering, statistics, software development and bioinformatics. This research implements a video annotation toolkit and evaluates it by looking at its usefulness in creating applications for different areas. It was found that many areas of study in the arts and sciences can benefit from a video annotation application tailored to their specific needs and that an annotation toolkit can significantly reduce the time for developing such applications. The toolkit was engineered through successive refinements of prototype applications developed for different application areas. The toolkit design was also guided by a set of features identified by the research community for an ideal general purpose annotation toolkit. This research contributes by combining these two different approaches to toolkit design and construction into a hybrid approach. This approach could be useful for similar or related efforts

When Michigan Changed the World

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/168165/1/2020-Feb_When_UM_Changed_the_World.pd

Reference architecture for Virtual Organization

"United we stand, divided we fall" ist eine bekannte Englische Redewendung. Wir leben in der Zeit der virtuellen Zusammenarbeit. Quellen sind logisch und Lösungen virtuell. Fortschritte auf der konzeptionellen und technologischen Ebene verbessern die Weise der menschlichen Kommunikation. Everything-as-a-Service war einmal nur ein Traum. Heute wird es Realität. Auch die Art der zu bewältigenden Probleme hat sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert. Heutzutage wird die Online-Kollaboration Über das Internet (e-Collaboration) in allen möglichen wissenschaftlichen Gebieten angewendet. Medizin, Technik, Meteorologie, Biologie, Chemie, Physik, Erdbeben und Wettervorhersage, Soziale Netzwerke usw., alle benutzen elektronische Plattformen. Umfangreiche Daten und Rechenressourcen sind nötig und auch die Assistenz durch menschlichee Experten wird immer bedeutsamer. Diese Situation stellt eine grosse Verantwortung fÜr IT Forscher und Entwickler dar, generische Plattformen zu schaffen, auf denen Benutzer einfach kommunizieren und Probleme gemeinsam lösen können. Das Verteiltes Rechnen (Distributed Computing) bietet viele technische Paradigmen an, wie zum Beispiel Cluster Computing, Grid Computing, Cloud Computing, um dieses Konzept umzusetzen. Konzeptuell erlauben Virtuelle Organisationen (Virtual Organization) ein harmonisches Zusammenspiel von global verbreiteten Ressourcen, um gemeinsam Ziele zu erreichen. Bestehende Paradigmen und Technologie werden heute in der Praxis zum Aufbau von Virtuellen Organisationen verwendet. Der Mangel an existierenden und anerkannten Standards dazu stellt jedoch ein kritischer Punkt fÜr die letzten zwei Dekaden dar. Unsere ForschungsbemÜhung konzentriert sich daher auf die Entwicklung eines Standards zum Entwurf und zur Realisierung Virtueller Organisationen. Der vorgelegte Standardisierungsansatz besteht aus zwei Phasen. Die erste Phase fÜhrt eine Anforderungsanalyse durch und die zweite Phase stellt eine Referenzarchitektur (Reference Architecture) fÜr Virtuelle Organisationen (RAVO) vor. Dieser Standardisierungsansatz wurde gewählt um sowohl technologische als auch paradigmatische Wechsel zu erlauben. Wir teilen unsere BemÜhungen in zwei Bereiche. Zuerst präsentieren wir einen Modellierungsansatz, um die Anforderungen und Komponenten der Virtuellen Organisation [1] zu identifiziert. Danach definieren wir einen generischen Rahmen, der auf dem Everything-as-a-Service Konzept aufbaut. Stakeholders sind ein wichtiges Element in jeder kooperationsunterstÜtzenden Umgebung [2] [3]. Daher haben wir ein neuartiges Schema fÜr Stakeholders entwickelt, die es erlaubt Beziehung zwischen Benutzer und Ressourcen in Form von Subjekten [1] [4] abzubilden. Zum Schluss werden diese Konzepte in Form konkreter Umsetzungen auf dem Gebiet des E-Learning und der Computational Intelligence untersucht. Die neuen Elemente der Stakeholders und Subjekt-Beziehungen wurden weiters in informelle Virtuelle Organisationen, sogenannten Sozialen Netzwerken, verifiziert [5]. Zur Evaluation des vorgestellten Ansatzes wurde schliesslich eine praktische Umsetzung, die auf RAVO basiert, unter dem Namen N2Sky als Masterarbeit an der Universität Wien durchgefÜhrt.“United we stand, divided we fall" is a well known saying. We are living in the era of virtual collaborations. Resources are logical and solutions are virtual. Advancement on conceptual and technological level has enhanced the way people communicate. Everything-as-a-Service once a dream, now becoming a reality. Problem nature has also been changed over the time. Today, e-Collaborations are applied to all the domains possible. Medical, engineering, meteorology, biology, chemistry, physics, earthquake and weather forecast, social networks and so on, all are using electronic platforms. Extensive data and computing resources are in need and assistance from human experts is also becoming essential. This puts a great responsibility on Information Technology (IT) researchers and developers to provide generic platforms where user can easily communicate and solve their problems. To realize this concept, distributed computing has offered many paradigms, e.g. cluster, grid, cloud computing. Virtual Organization (VO) is a logical orchestration of globally dispersed resources to achieve common goals. Existing paradigms and technology is used to form Virtual Organization, but lack of standards remained a critical issue for last two decades. Our research endeavor focuses on developing a standard for Virtual Organization building process. The proposed standardization process is a two phase activity. First phase provides requirement analysis and the second phase presents a Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization (RAVO). This form of standardization is chosen to accommodate both technological and paradigm shift. We categorize our efforts in two parts. First part consists of a pattern to identify the requirements and components of a Virtual Organization [1]. Second part details a generic framework based on the concept of Everything-as-a-Service. Stakeholders are an important entity in any collaborative environment [2] [3]. We developed a pattern for stakeholders and presented new relationship between user and resources in form of Subject [1] [4]. Finally, these concepts are materialized as a concrete framework in the domain of E-learning and Computational Intelligence. Stakeholders and Subject relationship are also verified in the domain of informal Virtual Organizations (e.g. Social Networks) [5]. For evaluation purpose an instance based on RAVO, named N2SKY [6] is developed by a master student at the University of Vienna

Collaborative radio making in a complex networked environment:from seduction to hope

The shift from analog to digital modes of production and distribution and the emergence of new and hybrid radio forms have presented challenges that many believed radio would not survive. To do so, it has been forced to integrate a variety of changes from the relationship between audiences and producers, to the way radio practitioners collaborate to co-create content. This study seeks to bring new knowledge to the currently under documented area of collaborative radio production. It does so using a two-phase process. The first phase employs an Action Research approach to study the production of 3 separate radio projects using a specially developed online content management system (ROAR). The second phase uses a Case Study methodology and Sonnenwald’s Four Stages of Collaboration framework to structure data into narrative format, prior to subjecting it to thematic analysis. Subsequently, cross case data comparison is used to develop a theoretically informed and empirically grounded framework, outlining how aspects of work organization can enable (or hinder) the development and successful completion of small-scale, collaborative radio projects. The study also extrapolates on some of the practical applications of this knowledge