CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts

This tutorial summarises our uses of reflectance transformation imaging in archaeological contexts. It introduces the UK AHRC funded project reflectance Transformation Imaging for Anciant Documentary Artefacts and demonstrates imaging methodologies

ImageSieve: Exploratory search of museum archives with named entity-based faceted browsing

Over the last few years, faceted search emerged as an attractive alternative to the traditional "text box" search and has become one of the standard ways of interaction on many e-commerce sites. However, these applications of faceted search are limited to domains where the objects of interests have already been classified along several independent dimensions, such as price, year, or brand. While automatic approaches to generate faceted search interfaces were proposed, it is not yet clear to what extent the automatically-produced interfaces will be useful to real users, and whether their quality can match or surpass their manually-produced predecessors. The goal of this paper is to introduce an exploratory search interface called ImageSieve, which shares many features with traditional faceted browsing, but can function without the use of traditional faceted metadata. ImageSieve uses automatically extracted and classified named entities, which play important roles in many domains (such as news collections, image archives, etc.). We describe one specific application of ImageSieve for image search. Here, named entities extracted from the descriptions of the retrieved images are used to organize a faceted browsing interface, which then helps users to make sense of and further explore the retrieved images. The results of a user study of ImageSieve demonstrate that a faceted search system based on named entities can help users explore large collections and find relevant information more effectively

Information Systems and Healthcare XXII: Characterizing and Visualizing the Quality of Health Information

We all need ways to assess the quality of the information we look for, but this task is critically important when we are seeking health information. Healthcare consumers increasingly seek and use health information to address their health concerns. However, many health consumers lack the time and expertise required to make solid judgments about the quality of health information they encounter. A full range of quality appraisal methods for health information offer help, yet health consumers use those methods infrequently. Health consumers need better support to overcome barriers to efficiency, scalability, and transparency often associated with this breadth of valuable methods. Furthermore, they need ways to assess the quality of health information they find in the context of their own, individually situated needs. Our goals were to investigate the concept of health information quality and to explore how we can provide health consumers with better support by highlighting, rather than hiding, important aspects of health information quality. First, by reviewing and synthesizing criteria used by a broad range of quality appraisal methods for health information, we identified four focal characteristics of health information quality: content, reference, authorship, and publisher. Together, these four characteristics of intrinsic quality provide an organizing framework for health consumers to assess the quality of health information along multiple dimensions according to their own needs. Next, we used a user-center approach to design a prototype tool that concretely illustrates our framework by allowing the user to highlight multiple dimensions of health information quality. We present a usage case example of this illustrative tool, which visualizes the quality of MEDLINE search results. Our work provides a new perspective on health information quality by acknowledging and supporting consumers\u27 needs for transparency and flexibility as they take a prominent role in health information quality assessment