Linking inside a video collection - what and how to measure?

Although linking video to additional information sources seems to be a sensible approach to satisfy information needs of user, the perspective of users is not yet analyzed on a fundamental level in real-life scenarios. However, a better understanding of the motivation of users to follow links in video, which anchors users prefer to link from within a video, and what type of link targets users are typically interested in, is important to be able to model automatic linking of audiovisual content appropriately. In this paper we report on our methodology towards eliciting user requirements with respect to video linking in the course of a broader study on user requirements in searching and a series of benchmark evaluations on searching and linking

Exploring digital comics as an edutainment tool: An overview

This paper aims t oexplore the growing potential of digital comics and graphic novels as an edutainment tool.Initially, the evolvement of comics medium along with academic and commercial initiatives in designing comicware systems arebriefly discussed. Prominent to this study, the methods and impact of utilizing this visual media with embedded instructional content and student-generated comics in classroom setting are rationallyoutlined.By recognizing the emerging technologies available for supporting and accelerating educational comic development, this article addresses the diverse research challenges and opportunities of innovating effective strategies to enhance comics integrated learning across disciplines

Towards a multimedia formatting vocabulary

Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine

Multimedia Annotation Interoperability Framework

Multimedia systems typically contain digital documents of mixed media types, which are indexed on the basis of strongly divergent metadata standards. This severely hamplers the inter-operation of such systems. Therefore, machine understanding of metadata comming from different applications is a basic requirement for the inter-operation of distributed Multimedia systems. In this document, we present how interoperability among metadata, vocabularies/ontologies and services is enhanced using Semantic Web technologies. In addition, it provides guidelines for semantic interoperability, illustrated by use cases. Finally, it presents an overview of the most commonly used metadata standards and tools, and provides the general research direction for semantic interoperability using Semantic Web technologies

Investigation of methods for user adapted visualisation of information in a hypermedia generation system

A literature review of user interaction to support creative processes is given. A design for an authoring system for semi-automatically generated hypermedia presentations is developed. The system designed is called SampLe (a Semi-Automatic Multimedia Presentation generation Environment

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Towards a multimedia formatting vocabulary

Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine