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

Visualising the structure of document search results: A comparison of graph theoretic approaches

This is the post-print of the article - Copyright @ 2010 Sage PublicationsPrevious work has shown that distance-similarity visualisation or ‘spatialisation’ can provide a potentially useful context in which to browse the results of a query search, enabling the user to adopt a simple local foraging or ‘cluster growing’ strategy to navigate through the retrieved document set. However, faithfully mapping feature-space models to visual space can be problematic owing to their inherent high dimensionality and non-linearity. Conventional linear approaches to dimension reduction tend to fail at this kind of task, sacrificing local structural in order to preserve a globally optimal mapping. In this paper the clustering performance of a recently proposed algorithm called isometric feature mapping (Isomap), which deals with non-linearity by transforming dissimilarities into geodesic distances, is compared to that of non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). Various graph pruning methods, for geodesic distance estimation, are also compared. Results show that Isomap is significantly better at preserving local structural detail than MDS, suggesting it is better suited to cluster growing and other semantic navigation tasks. Moreover, it is shown that applying a minimum-cost graph pruning criterion can provide a parameter-free alternative to the traditional K-neighbour method, resulting in spatial clustering that is equivalent to or better than that achieved using an optimal-K criterion

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

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation

SiFo-Peers: A Social FOAF Based Peer-to-Peer Network

In this paper, an attempt is made to conceptually unite three different application areas for semantic technologies, namely personal Knowledge Management, social networking, and Peer-to-Peer information-sharing. Until now, semantic technology has been applied to each of these application areas separately or in binary combinations only. By functionally combining all three areas in a single application, it is hoped to sketch a compelling Semantic Web system that will help increase the spread and acceptance of the Semantic Web vision. A concrete usage scenario of a community of researchers is used to demonstrate the approach