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

A zoomable shopping browser using a graphic-treemap

Effective and efficient navigation and representation of the entire structure of the product catalogue is one of the important factors for on-line market. This paper proposes an application using Treemaps visualization to enhance the functionality of online product category. We aim to develop high-quality catalog interfaces in terms of readability, understandability and comprehension by integrating graphics into Treemaps. We applied two types of Treemaps: 1) Slice-and-Dice Treemap, 2) Squarified Treemap, into the on-line catalogue to address the small windowproblem allowing buyers to overview and navigate large product categories dynamically. We also use a history bar that locates on the top of each category and sub-category to provide a 2.5-dimensional view of contextual information. © 2009 IEEE

A distributed solution to software reuse

Reuse can be applied to all stages of the software lifecycle to enhance quality and to shorten time of completion for a project. During the phases of design and implementation are some examples of where reuse can be applied, but one frequent obstruction to development is the building of and the identifying of desirable components. This can be costly in the short term but an organisation can gain the profits of applying this scheme if they are seeking long-term goals. Web services are a recent development in distributed computing. This thesis combines the two research areas to produce a distributed solution to software reuse that displays the advantages of distributed computing within a reuse system. This resulted in a web application with access to web services that allowed two different formats of component to be inserted into a reuse repository. These components were searchable by keywords and the results are adjustable by the popularity of a component’s extraction from the system and by user ratings of it; this improved the accuracy of the search. This work displays the accuracy, usability, and speed of this system when tested with five undergraduate and five postgraduate students

Scale free information retrieval : visually searching and navigating the web

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. [91]-92).Daniel Ethan Dreilinger.M.S

An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents

Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine

Software is Scholarship

This Article provides the first systematic account and justification of software applications as works of scholarship. Software is scholarship to the extent that software functionality is derived from scholarly research, software is used as a means to develop scholarship, or software is used as a medium to communicate scholarly ideas. Software applications are superior to articles and books for communicating scholarly ideas because software is not limited by the constraints of traditional written works. Software can communicate using a wide variety of textual components, graphical elements, and programmable interactivity that significantly enhance the ability to communicate scholarly concepts, arguments, and findings. This Article identifies four methods for software applications to enhance scholarly communication: app-ified argumentation that provides theoretical clarity, interactive toolkits that create rich qualitative studies, data visualizations that persuade using data, and policy tech that improves the ability to enact social change. Interactive software applications can enhance research agendas in the humanities and social sciences by making traditional, prose scholarship more thorough, persuasive, and analytically precise. Due to recent innovations, developing software for scholarly purposes is accessible to those that work in the humanities. Platforms for developing software have grown so sophisticated that they no longer require creators to write code to develop powerful, data rich, and well-designed interactive applications. Scholars should accordingly use and develop software to better communicate their ideas. By providing a framework for developing software as works of scholarship, this Article contributes to the field of digital humanities. To better understand this Article’s concept of scholarly software, I apply my conceptualization of scholarly software to legal scholarship and legal technology and discuss three case studies: LegalTech toolkits, voice recognition for automated contract drafting, and court data visualizations. Law is a fertile ground for the development of scholarly software because the core of legal reasoning consists of a formalistic, computational structure that is well-expressed through programmable applications. This Article contributes to legal scholarship by identifying how it can be enhanced through the creation of software applications

Software maintenance: redocumentation of existing Cobol systems using hypertext technology

One of the major problems associated with the maintenance of existing software systems is their lack of documentation. This can make very large, poorly structured programs very difficult to maintain. Nearly all traditional documentation tools are either designed for use in the development stage of the software lifecycle or are report generators such as cross reference generators. The problems of lack of documentation are compounded when applied to third party software maintenance as the staffs are often initially unfamiliar with the code they are maintaining. This thesis describes these problems in detail and evaluates the feasibility of a tool to help with redocumentation based on current hypertext technology

Wellcome Library Transcribing Recipes Project: Final Report

The Wellcome Library, in considering a project to digitise and transcribe recipe manuscripts using crowdsourcing technologies, commissioned this report from Ben Brumfield and Mia Ridge in Summer 2015. The report addresses issues specific to this project, and to the Wellcome Library's digital infrastructure