CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Managing complexity in a distributed digital library

As the capabilities of distributed digital libraries increase, managing organizational and software complexity becomes a key issue. How can collections and indexes be updated without impacting queries currently in progress? How can the system handle several user-interface clients for the same collections? Computer science professors and lectors from the University of Waikato have developed a software structure that successfully manages this complexity in the New Zealand Digital Library. This digital library has been a success in managing organizational and software complexity. The researchers' primary goal has been to minimize the effort required to keep the system operational and yet continue to expand its offerings

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

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Roots Reloaded. Culture, Identity and Social Development in the Digital Age

This edited volume is designed to explore different perspectives of culture, identity and social development using the impact of the digital age as a common thread, aiming at interdisciplinary audiences. Cases of communities and individuals using new technology as a tool to preserve and explore their cultural heritage alongside new media as a source for social orientation ranging from language acquisition to health-related issues will be covered. Therefore, aspects such as Art and Cultural Studies, Media and Communication, Behavioral Science, Psychology, Philosophy and innovative approaches used by creative individuals are included. From the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, to the Maoris of New Zealand, to the mystical teachings of Sufi brotherhoods, the significance of the oral and written traditions and their current relation to online activities shall be discussed in the opening article. The book continues with a closer look at obesity awareness support groups and their impact on social media, Facebook usage in language learning context, smartphone addiction and internet dependency, as well as online media reporting of controversial ethical issues. The Digital progress has already left its dominating mark as the world entered the 21st century. Without a doubt, as technology continues its ascent, society will be faced with new and altering values in an effort to catch-up with this extraordinary Digitization, adapt satisfactorily in order to utilize these strong developments in everyday life

Simulated testing of an adaptive multimedia information retrieval system

The Semantic Gap is considered to be a bottleneck in image and video retrieval. One way to increase the communication between user and system is to take advantage of the user's action with a system, e.g. to infer the relevance or otherwise of a video shot viewed by the user. In this paper we introduce a novel video retrieval system and propose a model of implicit information for interpreting the user's actions with the interface. The assumptions on which this model was created are then analysed in an experiment using simulated users based on relevance judgements to compare results of explicit and implicit retrieval cycles. Our model seems to enhance retrieval results. Results are presented and discussed in the final section

The design and evaluation of multilingual social media portal: Working paper series--11-09

Web 2.0 has created a large amount of user-generated content from online social media such as forums, blogs, social-networking sites, etc. As a result, the volume of social media data has been growing exponentially. Such user-generated data contains valuable information about people's ideas and opinions toward products, services or social/political issues. However, certain issues related to social media data, including data integration and multilingual issues, are difficult to analyze with this type of data. This paper develops a general framework of social media portals. It can collect and incorporate data from heterogeneous social media sites, and provide unified data integration, search, and multilingual translation supports. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, a prototype system, the Dark Web Forums Portal, is built using social media from homeland security-related data sources. The user evaluation results show that, compared with alternative ways of searching and understanding multilingual social media content, the portal can help users locate information more quickly and effectively. Users also perceived significantly higher system quality, ease of use, usefulness, satisfaction, intention to use when using the portal. The results demonstrated the advancement of the proposed system framework

Semantic annotation of digital music

AbstractIn recent times, digital music items on the internet have been evolving in a vast information space where consumers try to find/locate the piece of music of their choice by means of search engines. The current trend of searching for music by means of music consumersʼ keywords/tags is unable to provide satisfactory search results. It is argued that search and retrieval of music can be significantly improved provided end-usersʼ tags are associated with semantic information in terms of acoustic metadata – the latter being easy to extract automatically from digital music items. This paper presents a lightweight ontology that will enable music producers to annotate music against MPEG-7 description (with its acoustic metadata) and the generated annotation may in turn be used to deliver meaningful search results. Several potential multimedia ontologies have been explored and a music annotation ontology, named mpeg-7Music, has been designed so that it can be used as a backbone for annotating music items