Reflections on Mira : interactive evaluation in information retrieval

Evaluation in information retrieval (IR) has focussed largely on noninteractive evaluation of text retrieval systems. This is increasingly at odds with how people use modern IR systems: in highly interactive settings to access linked, multimedia information. Furthermore, this approach ignores potential improvements through better interface design. In 1996 the Commission of the European Union Information Technologies Programme, funded a three year working group, Mira, to discuss and advance research in the area of evaluation frameworks for interactive and multimedia IR applications. Led by Keith van Rijsbergen, Steve Draper and myself from Glasgow University, this working group brought together many of the leading researchers in the evaluation domain from both the IR and human computer interaction (HCI) communities. This paper presents my personal view of the main lines of discussion that took place throughout Mira: importing and adapting evaluation techniques from HCI, evaluating at different levels as appropriate, evaluating against different types of relevance and the new challenges that drive the need for rethinking the old evaluation approaches. The paper concludes that we need to consider more varied forms of evaluation to complement engine evaluation

CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version

The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action). This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events. The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search. A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009

Experiences in Integrated Multi-Domain Service Management

Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of telecommunications services and management systems over multiple organisational domains. This paper presents some of the results of practical development work in this area, detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services. This work covers the integration of multimedia services, broadband networks, service management and network management, though the detailed examples given focus specifically on the integration of services and service management

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

Challenges and opportunities of context-aware information access

Ubiquitous computing environments embedding a wide range of pervasive computing technologies provide a challenging and exciting new domain for information access. Individuals working in these environments are increasingly permanently connected to rich information resources. An appealing opportunity of these environments is the potential to deliver useful information to individuals either from their previous information experiences or external sources. This information should enrich their life experiences or make them more effective in their endeavours. Information access in ubiquitous computing environments can be made "context-aware" by exploiting the wide range context data available describing the environment, the searcher and the information itself. Realizing such a vision of reliable, timely and appropriate identification and delivery of information in this way poses numerous challenges. A central theme in achieving context-aware information access is the combination of information retrieval with multiple dimensions of available context data. Potential context data sources, include the user's current task, inputs from environmental and biometric sensors, associated with the user's current context, previous contexts, and document context, which can be exploited using a variety of technologies to create new and exciting possibilities for information access

Synote: weaving media fragments and linked data

While end users could easily share and tag the multimedia resources online, the searching and reusing of the inside content of multimedia, such as a certain area within an image or a ten minutes segment within a one-hour video, is still difficult. Linked data is a promising way to interlink media fragments with other resources. Many applications in Web 2.0 have generated large amount of external annotations linked to media fragments. In this paper, we use Synote as the target application to discuss how media fragments could be published together with external annotations following linked data principles. Our design solves the dereferencing, describing and interlinking methods problems in interlinking multimedia. We also implement a model to let Google index media fragments which improves media fragments' online presence. The evaluation shows that our design can successfully publish media fragments and annotations for both semantic Web agents and traditional search engines. Publishing media fragments using the design we describe in this paper will lead to better indexing of multimedia resources and their consequent findabilit

Tools for modelling support and construction of optimization applications

We argue the case for an open systems approach towards modelling and application support. We discuss how the 'usability' and 'skills' analysis naturally leads to a viable strategy for integrating application construction with modelling tools and optimizers. The role of the implementation environment is also seen to be critical in that it is retained as a building block within the resulting system