Video summarisation: A conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art

This is the post-print (final draft post-refereeing) version of the article. Copyright @ 2007 Elsevier Inc.Video summaries provide condensed and succinct representations of the content of a video stream through a combination of still images, video segments, graphical representations and textual descriptors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video summarisation derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature. The framework distinguishes between video summarisation techniques (the methods used to process content from a source video stream to achieve a summarisation of that stream) and video summaries (outputs of video summarisation techniques). Video summarisation techniques are considered within three broad categories: internal (analyse information sourced directly from the video stream), external (analyse information not sourced directly from the video stream) and hybrid (analyse a combination of internal and external information). Video summaries are considered as a function of the type of content they are derived from (object, event, perception or feature based) and the functionality offered to the user for their consumption (interactive or static, personalised or generic). It is argued that video summarisation would benefit from greater incorporation of external information, particularly user based information that is unobtrusively sourced, in order to overcome longstanding challenges such as the semantic gap and providing video summaries that have greater relevance to individual users

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

Digitized Archival Primary Sources in STEM: A Selected Webliography

Popular connotations of archives and special collections are most closely aligned with the arts and humanities fields, with history being the most seamless affiliation. However, archival documentation extends far beyond common disciplinary assumptions, with strong holdings relevant to the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, as well as medicine and other allied disciplines. These archival collections provide largely untapped educational, enrichment, and research opportunities for STEM students and researchers. Given the profound influx of digitization during the last two decades, many archival primary source materials have been digitized and are now freely available online, with more assuredly in progress. This digital content is in large part unique, oftentimes representing digital surrogates of the only tangible copy of a document, image, object, or unique assemblage of materials ever created. An intrinsic value in archives is their uniqueness in addition to their authenticity, diversity, breadth, and depth of documentation. Digitized archival collections can serve to supplement an institution\u27s physical archival holdings, if available, as well as make particularly unique or historically significant physical collections (i.e., the papers of Charles Darwin), once limited by geography, easily accessible to librarians, archivists, researchers, educators, and students around the world. Accessibility and findability of digitized archival resources can be a challenge, particularly for students or researchers not familiar with archival formats and digital interfaces, which adhere to different descriptive standards than more widely familiar library resources. Numerous aggregate archival collection databases exist, which provide a means by which to search across collections from many institutions. However, no single database is comprehensive, and many also lack robust capabilities for subject-based browsing to target STEM collections. The selected resources in this webliography are intended as a starting point by which librarians, archivists, educators, and students may discover digitized archival primary sources related to STEM and allied disciplines, which may be creatively used as tools to inform instruction, teaching, research, library collection development, marketing, and reference services. The resources embody a wide-ranging selection of noteworthy, historically significant STEM-focused archival primary source collections currently digitized and publicly accessible

Smartbook: Semantics Inside

This paper presents a vision for the future of the e-books which entails further development of technologies that will facilitate the creation and use of a new generation of "smart" books: e-books that are evolving, highly interactive, customisable, adaptable, intelligent, and furnished with a rich set of collaborative authoring and reading support services. The proposed set of tools will be integrated into an intelligent framework for collaborative book authoring and experiencing called SmartBook. The paper promotes the idea that the semantic technologies, intensively developed recently in connection with the Semantic Web initiative, can be incorporated in the book and become the key factor of making it "smarter"

Developing Adaptive and Personalized Mobile Applications: A Framework and Design Issues

The rapid growth of mobile technology has expedited ubiquitous information access via handheld devices. However, the fundamental natures of mobile information systems are different from those of desktop applications in terms of purpose of use, device features, communication networks, and working environments. This poses various challenges to mobile information systems on how to deliver and present multimedia content in an effective and adaptive manner. One of the major challenges is to deliver personalized information to the right person in a preferred format based on the changing environment. This paper proposes an innovative framework for developing mobile applications that deliver personalized, context-aware, and adaptive content to mobile users. The framework consists of four major components: information selection, content analysis, media transcoding, and customized presentation. It can be applied to a variety of mobile applications such as mobile web, news alert services, and mobile commerce

A Human-Centered Design Approach to Access to Justice: Generating New Prototypes and Hypotheses for Intervention to Make Courts User-Friendly

How can the court system be made more navigable and comprehensible to unrepresented laypeople trying to use it to solve their family, housing, debt, employment, or other life problems? This Article chronicles human-centered design work to generate solutions to this fundamental challenge of access to justice. It presents a new methodology: human-centered design research that can identify key opportunity areas for interventions, user requirements for interventions, and a shortlist of vetted ideas for interventions. This research presents both the methodology and these “design deliverables” based on work with California state courts’ Self Help Centers. It identifies seven key areas for courts to improve their usability, and, in each area, proposes a range of new interventions that emerged from the class’s design work. This research lays the groundwork for pilots and randomized control trials, with its proposed hypotheses and prototypes for new interventions, that can be piloted, evaluated, and — ideally — have a practical effect on how comprehensible, navigable, and efficient the civil court system is