Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Recommendations and Prototyping Project Reports

This document assembles and describes the outcomes of the four prototyping projects undertaken as part of the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA) research project (2013 – 2015). Each prototyping project team provided its own final report. These reports are assembled together and included in this document. Based on the totality of results reported, the WCSA project team also provide a set of overarching recommendations for HTRC implementation and adoption of research conducted by the Prototyping Project teams. The work described here was made possible through the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666).The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666)Ope

Museum as ecology: A case study analysis of an ambient intelligent museum guide

This paper explores the usefulness of the ecology concept as an analytical framework for designing interactive technology in museums. We aim to describe and evaluate an ecological approach to understanding museums and to examine information and cultural ecologies as analytical tools for guiding the design of interactive systems. We focus on two related concepts of ecology, cultural ecology (Bell 2002) and information ecology (Nardi and O\u27Day 1999). Utilizing each of the two frameworks, we analyze observational and interview data we collected during the research for an ambient intelligent museum guide. We also discuss the design implications of our analysis. In this paper we found that an ecology framework is highly appropriate for representing the complexities of activities, relationships, technologies and people connected to museums. We also found the information

Self-organizing distributed digital library supporting audio-video

The StreamOnTheFly network combines peer-to-peer networking and open-archive principles for community radio channels and TV stations in Europe. StreamOnTheFly demonstrates new methods of archive management and personalization technologies for both audio and video. It also provides a collaboration platform for community purposes that suits the flexible activity patterns of these kinds of broadcaster communities

k-Nearest Neighbour Classifiers: 2nd Edition (with Python examples)

Perhaps the most straightforward classifier in the arsenal or machine learning techniques is the Nearest Neighbour Classifier -- classification is achieved by identifying the nearest neighbours to a query example and using those neighbours to determine the class of the query. This approach to classification is of particular importance because issues of poor run-time performance is not such a problem these days with the computational power that is available. This paper presents an overview of techniques for Nearest Neighbour classification focusing on; mechanisms for assessing similarity (distance), computational issues in identifying nearest neighbours and mechanisms for reducing the dimension of the data. This paper is the second edition of a paper previously published as a technical report. Sections on similarity measures for time-series, retrieval speed-up and intrinsic dimensionality have been added. An Appendix is included providing access to Python code for the key methods.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures: An updated edition of an older tutorial on kN

Building information modeling – A game changer for interoperability and a chance for digital preservation of architectural data?

Digital data associated with the architectural design-andconstruction process is an essential resource alongside -and even past- the lifecycle of the construction object it describes. Despite this, digital architectural data remains to be largely neglected in digital preservation research – and vice versa, digital preservation is so far neglected in the design-and-construction process. In the last 5 years, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has seen a growing adoption in the architecture and construction domains, marking a large step towards much needed interoperability. The open standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is one way in which data is exchanged in BIM processes. This paper presents a first digital preservation based look at BIM processes, highlighting the history and adoption of the methods as well as the open file format standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) as one way to store and preserve BIM data

Tradition and Technology: A Design-Based Prototype of an Online Ginan Semantization Tool

The heritage of ginans of the Nizari Ismaili community comprises over 1,000 individual hymn-like poems of varying lengths and languages. The ginans were originally composed to spread the teachings of the Satpanth Ismaili faith and served as scriptural texts that guided the normative understanding of the community in South Asia. The emotive melodies of the ginans continue to enchant the members of the community in the diaspora who do not necessarily understand the language of the ginans. The language of the ginans is mixed and borrows vocabulary from Indo-Aryan and Perso-Arabic dialects. With deliberate and purposeful use of information technology, the online tool blends the Western best practices of language learning with the traditional transmission methods and materials of the Ismaili community. This study is based on the premise that for the teachings of the ginans to survive in the Euro-American diaspora, the successive generations must learn and understand the vocabulary of the ginans. The process through which humans learn and master vocabulary is called semantization, which refers to the process of learning and understand various senses and uses of words in a language. To this end, a sample ginan corpus was chosen and semantically analyzed to develop an online ginan lexicon. This lexicon was then used to enrich ginan texts with online glosses to facilitate semantization of ginan vocabulary. The design based-research methodology for prototyping the tool comprised two design iterations of analysis, design, and review. In the first iteration, the initial design of the prototype was based on the multidisciplinary literature review and an in-depth semantic analysis of ginan materials. The initial design was then reviewed by community ginan experts and teachers to inform the next design iteration. In the second design iteration, the initial design was enhanced into a functional prototype by adding features based on the expert suggestions as well as the needs of community learners gathered by surveying a convenience sample of 515 community members across the globe. The analysis of the survey data revealed that over 90% of the survey participants preferred English materials for learning and understanding the language of the ginans. In addition, having online access to ginan materials was expressed as a dire need for the community to engage with the ginans. The development and dissemination of curriculum-based educational programs and supporting resources for the ginans emerged as the most urgent and unmet expectations of the community. The study also confirmed that the wide availability of an online ginan learning tool, such as the one designed in this study, is highly desirable by English-speaking community members who want to learn and understand the tradition and teachings of ginans. However, such a tool is only a part of the solution for fostering sustainable community engagement for the preservation of ginans. To ensure that the tradition is carried forward by the future generations with compassion and understanding, the community institutions must make ginans an educational priority and ensure educational resources for ginans are widely available to community members