Applying digital content management to support localisation

The retrieval and presentation of digital content such as that on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a substantial area of research. While recent years have seen huge expansion in the size of web-based archives that can be searched efficiently by commercial search engines, the presentation of potentially relevant content is still limited to ranked document lists represented by simple text snippets or image keyframe surrogates. There is expanding interest in techniques to personalise the presentation of content to improve the richness and effectiveness of the user experience. One of the most significant challenges to achieving this is the increasingly multilingual nature of this data, and the need to provide suitably localised responses to users based on this content. The Digital Content Management (DCM) track of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is seeking to develop technologies to support advanced personalised access and presentation of information by combining elements from the existing research areas of Adaptive Hypermedia and Information Retrieval. The combination of these technologies is intended to produce significant improvements in the way users access information. We review key features of these technologies and introduce early ideas for how these technologies can support localisation and localised content before concluding with some impressions of future directions in DCM

The TREC2001 video track: information retrieval on digital video information

The development of techniques to support content-based access to archives of digital video information has recently started to receive much attention from the research community. During 2001, the annual TREC activity, which has been benchmarking the performance of information retrieval techniques on a range of media for 10 years, included a ”track“ or activity which allowed investigation into approaches to support searching through a video library. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive picture of the different approaches taken by the TREC2001 video track participants but instead we give an overview of the TREC video search task and a thumbnail sketch of the approaches taken by different groups. The reason for writing this paper is to highlight the message from the TREC video track that there are now a variety of approaches available for searching and browsing through digital video archives, that these approaches do work, are scalable to larger archives and can yield useful retrieval performance for users. This has important implications in making digital libraries of video information attainable

Automated annotation of multimedia audio data with affective labels for information management

The emergence of digital multimedia systems is creating many new opportunities for rapid access to huge content archives. In order to fully exploit these information sources, the content must be annotated with significant features. An important aspect of human interpretation of multimedia data, which is often overlooked, is the affective dimension. Such information is a potentially useful component for content-based classification and retrieval. Much of the affective information of multimedia content is contained within the audio data stream. Emotional features can be defined in terms of arousal and valence levels. In this study low-level audio features are extracted to calculate arousal and valence levels of multimedia audio streams. These are then mapped onto a set of keywords with predetermined emotional interpretations. Experimental results illustrate the use of this system to assign affective annotation to multimedia data

An Investigation on Text-Based Cross-Language Picture Retrieval Effectiveness through the Analysis of User Queries

Purpose: This paper describes a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive. Italian speaking users generated 618 queries for a set of known-item search tasks. The queries generated by user’s interaction with the system have been analysed and the results used to suggest recommendations for the future development of cross-language retrieval systems for digital image libraries. Methodology: A controlled lab-based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian-English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searches for 16 images provided to them, a known-item search task. User’s interactions with the system were recorded and queries were analysed manually quantitatively and qualitatively. Findings: Results highlight the diversity in requests for similar visual content and the weaknesses of Machine Translation for query translation. Through the manual translation of queries we show the benefits of using high-quality translation resources. The results show the individual characteristics of user’s whilst performing known-item searches and the overlap obtained between query terms and structured image captions, highlighting the use of user’s search terms for objects within the foreground of an image. Limitations and Implications: This research looks in-depth into one case of interaction and one image repository. Despite this limitation, the discussed results are likely to be valid across other languages and image repository. Value: The growing quantity of digital visual material in digital libraries offers the potential to apply techniques from CLIR to provide cross-language information access services. However, to develop effective systems requires studying user’s search behaviours, particularly in digital image libraries. The value of this paper is in the provision of empirical evidence to support recommendations for effective cross-language image retrieval system design.</p

GLARE Digital Library (Group Learning and Research Exhibition)

A Digital library is a managed collection of digital information associated with services. Information is organized systematically for easier retrieval. The digital content can be stored locally or can be accessed remotely via computer networks. A digital library is a form of an information retrieval system. For digital collections, a digital library can provide services to select, organize, offer authorized access, interpret, distribute, and preserve over time. Digital library require: Relational databases that support a variety of digital formats, Full text search engines to index, retrieve, and provide access to documents, and Document management functions. One of the most important issues faced for creating a digital library is handling metadata. Metadata describes the content and attributes of a particular item in a digital library. The prominent scheme is Dublin Core, which is an effort to determine the “core” elements needed to describe documents. This project involved developing a digital library for university research projects. This can be used as a platform for faculty and students to showcase their projects, publications, datasets, and other kinds of digital content. Every user is given a user account and can use appropriate digital library services based on the permissions they have. Guest users can take the advantage of viewing, downloading, and commenting on the documents uploaded for public use. Administrator services include adding new categories of documents, editing or deleting the present categories, and removing flagged documents or videos by the users of the digital library. Professors can use a set of predefined groups or create their own dynamic groups to share content. Students can share their documents with predefined groups. This digital library was developed using MYSQL, HTML, CSS, PHP, jQuery, Ajax, Bootstrap and Java Scripts. Dublin core metadata terms are used to represent resources such as documents and videos and provide search mechanisms

Trends and Issues in Digital Libraries

The study explored trends and issues in digital libraries with a view to furnish the expected audience with current happenings in this area of operations and service delivery. The chapter is a detailed review of characteristics of digital libraries considering the creation of digital collections which include conversion of retrospective materials, born digital resources and institutional repositories. The paper considered digital collections and copyright issues, benefits and issues of digital libraries, preservation of digital content. It x-rayed trends in information discovery, access and retrieval in a digital library, human-computer interaction, information organization and categorization of digital library services

A scheme for content based retrieval of music data in MIDI format

With phenomenal increases in the generation and storage of digital audio data in several applications, there is growing need for organizing audio data in databases and providing users with fast access to desired data. This paper presents a scheme for the content-based query and retrieval of audio data stored in MIDI format. This is based on extraction of melody from the MIDI files and suitably comparing with the melody of the query. The results of retrieval using the proposed algorithm are presented.<br /

Conceptual challenges for the evaluation of digital repositories with multiple access options

The evaluation of digital repositories with multiple access options poses various questions concerning the choice of an appropriate methodology and an adequate evaluation setting. Especially when semantic concepts are represented by visual components a multimethodology approach needs to be taken. This paper discusses such an approach for coping with the various challenges. This work is based on a digital image repository that allows multiple access via semantic concepts such as topic maps, classical full-text search and content-based image retrieval. This system is the central part of a research project known as Living Memory

An examination of automatic video retrieval technology on access to the contents of an historical video archive

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an initial understanding of the constraints that historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach – A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as a case study. Multiple methods were employed to investigate the effectiveness of technology and the modality of user access. Automatic keyframe extraction was tested on the visual content while the audio stream was used for automatic classification of speech and music clips. The user access (search vs browse) was assessed in a controlled user evaluation. A focus group and a survey provided insight on the actual use of the analogue archive. The results of these multiple studies were then compared and integrated (triangulation). Findings – The amateur material challenged automatic techniques for video and audio indexing, thus suggesting that the technology must be tested against the material before deciding on a digitisation strategy. Two user interaction modalities, browsing vs searching, were tested in a user evaluation. Results show users preferred searching, but browsing becomes essential when the search engine fails in matching query and indexed words. Browsing was also valued for serendipitous discovery; however the organisation of the archive was judged cryptic and therefore of limited use. This indicates that the categorisation of an online archive should be thought of in terms of users who might not understand the current classification. The focus group and the survey showed clearly the advantage of online access even when the quality of the video surrogate is poor. The evidence gathered suggests that the creation of a digital version of a video archive requires a rethinking of the collection in terms of the new medium: a new archive should be specially designed to exploit the potential that the digital medium offers. Similarly, users' needs have to be considered before designing the digital library interface, as needs are likely to be different from those imagined. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to understand the advantages offered and limitations held by video retrieval technology for small video archives like those often found in special collections