Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

Exploring Multimedia Web Conferencing

Internet changed the perspective on meetings and also on decision making processes. Virtualization of meetings has become a common way for collaboration among employees, customers, partners, trainees and trainers, etc. Web conferencing allows the collaboration between teams' members to achieve common goals. Without the need of travelling and meeting organization, the web conferencing applications permit the participation of people from different location. Web conferencing applications are multimedia systems that allow various remote collaborations with multiple types of resources. The paper presents an exploratory study on multimedia web conferencing systems, its advantages and disadvantages and also a use case, meant to highlight several of this technology benefits and problems.multimedia web conferencing, web collaboration, virtual teams, decision support

Information extraction from multimedia web documents: an open-source platform and testbed

The LivingKnowledge project aimed to enhance the current state of the art in search, retrieval and knowledge management on the web by advancing the use of sentiment and opinion analysis within multimedia applications. To achieve this aim, a diverse set of novel and complementary analysis techniques have been integrated into a single, but extensible software platform on which such applications can be built. The platform combines state-of-the-art techniques for extracting facts, opinions and sentiment from multimedia documents, and unlike earlier platforms, it exploits both visual and textual techniques to support multimedia information retrieval. Foreseeing the usefulness of this software in the wider community, the platform has been made generally available as an open-source project. This paper describes the platform design, gives an overview of the analysis algorithms integrated into the system and describes two applications that utilise the system for multimedia information retrieval

Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications

Let Google index your media fragments

Current multimedia applications in Web 2.0 have generated a massive amount of multimedia resources, but most search results for multimedia resources still focus on the whole re-source level. Media fragments expose the inside content of multimedia resources for annotations, but they are yet fully explored and indexed by major search engines. W3C has published Media Fragment 1.0 as a standard way to describe media fragments on the Web. In this proposal, we make use of Google's Ajax Application Crawler to index media fragments represented by Media Fragment URIs. Each media fragment with related annotations will have an individual snapshot page, which could be indexed by the crawler. Initial evaluation has shown that the snapshot pages are successfully fetched by Googlebot and we are expecting more media fragments to be indexed using this method, so that the search for multimedia resources would be more efficient

An Application of Multimedia Services on Transportation: The Use of the World Wide Web (WWW)

INTRODUCTION In recent years, there is an ever-increasing demand and interest in the use of multimedia technology and applications in industry, government and academia. Multimedia is often seen by researchers as the next step forward in interfacing science, technology and community. Yet, the terminology of multimedia bears several meanings. It may refer to Compact Disc (CD), moving pictures or video-conferencing. The multimedia technology referred in this paper is the World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext publishing information system which was developed by and started at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since the introduction of WWW, its use has increased dramatically within a couple of years in a widely diverse community including government departments, university and research establishments, and commercial organisations. It has significant influence to our communities and our daily lives. Yet, in most cases, applications of WWW services are largely restricted to electronic library referencelcatalogue search facilities, electronic mail systems, electronic conference and discussion systems, electronic news and publishing agents, and remote access to computing resources on the Internet. The primary objective of this paper is to exploit the potential of this multimedia technology as a simple, easy-to-use and effective means of telematics application in transportation research. It is hoped that initiatives are highlighted via this study and hence encourage participations and collaborations from different sectors of industries. In this paper, a brief history of WWW is given in section (2). An overview of the technical aspects in providing a WWW service is presented in section (3) in terms of computer hardware requirements, software installation, network connections, application maintenance and administration, and system security. Compared to most commercially available multimedia software in the market, WWW services are cheap to run, userfriendly and readily available to the public on the Internet. In order to exploit the potential of WWW on transportation research, a study was carried out and results of the findings are reported in section (4). To further substantiate the level of usefulness, two particular WWW applications were chosen amongst other web services and they are reported in section (5) for illustrative purposes. The selected applications are the 'Transportation Resources on the Internet' developed in mid-1994 in the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds in England, and the 'Southern California Real-Time Traffic Report' developed by Maxwell Laboratories, Inc. in collaboration with the California State Department of Transportation in the US. Finally, a set of issues are raised in section (6), highlighting the directions of future development of WWW as an easy-touse, cheap and effective multimedia telematics application on transportation

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