Ontological Approaches to Modelling Narrative

We outline a simple taxonomy of approaches to modelling narrative, explain how these might be realised ontologically, and describe our continuing work to apply these techniques to the problem of Memories for Life

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend

The Application of Advanced Knowledge Technologies for Emergency Reponse

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support sense- and decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response

An Investigation into Automatically Captured Autobiographical Metadata, and the Support for Autobiographical Narrative Generation. Mini-Thesis: PhD upgrade report

Personal information and the act of publishing multimedia artifacts to the World Wide Web is becoming more and more observable. This report presents an infrastructure for the capturing and exploitation of personal metadata to drive research into context aware systems. I aim to expose ongoing research in the areas of capture of personal experiences, context aware systems, multimedia annotation systems, narrative generation, and that of Semantic Web enabling technologies. This report details the work underway towards the goal of creating a multidomain contextual log, and is followed by a discussion of how this work is being used to drive the development of a multimedia asset management system infrastructure. Practical work already completed as part of this project is then described, focusing on the areas of data integration, infrastructure, and personal photo collection annotation, all in the Semantic Web context. The future plan draws together the work completed and presents how the autobiographical context captured will be evaluated to provide insight into the utility of the metadata harnessed to aid human memory management. This is followed by the proposed evaluation of how suitable semi-automatically captured metadata can be to facilitate the construction of a narrative of a person’s observable life

Narrative as a Form of Knowledge Transfer, Narrative Theory and Semantic: Present Challenges - Future Possibilities (9 month Report)

An increase in digital multimedia data, has presented computer scientists with the key problem of large-scale information management. The Semantic Web vision proposes the publishing of information as semanticly accessible resources. Current methods of querying and browsing such rich knowledge bases require an understanding of the domain at hand that can not be asked of end-users. This progress report aims to present how Narratives, that are core to our method of conceptualising our environment, can be used to present targeted knowledge to an end-user. Ontology definitions are promoted as the fundamental building blocks for annotating these multimedia resources and are presented as key to this research. The main contribution of this paper is the identification of the shortcomings of existing narrative generation systems, followed by the identification of techniques that could be adopted to overcome these deficiencies

Narrative as a Form of Knowledge Transfer: Narrative Theory and Semantics

This paper presents a theoretical discussion of semantically enabled technologies that adopt narrative theories to aid knowledge transfer. The paper aims to present the applicability of existing narrative theories as methods of transferring and retrieving knowledge, underlying the importance of semantic mark-up

Towards the Narrative Annotation of Personal Information and Gaming Environments

This paper presents an analogy between SemanticWeb technologies and an existing narrative theory. Narrative generation is presented as an alternative method of human computer interaction, in the form of context based search. The discussions are grounded in domains of Memories for Life, and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games

Photocopain - Annotating Memories For Life

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to spend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to manage their collections. This poster outlines Photocopain, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information extracted from the content of the image. These automatically generated annotations are then presented to the user for extension or alteration as need be. This work is presented as an initial investigation into the applicability of surreptitiously captured metadata to describe the events of a person’s observable life

The Semantic Logger: Supporting Service Building from Personal Context

The Semantic Logger SL) is presentedas a system for the importing, housing, and exploiting of personal information. The system has been implemented using a number of Semantic Web enabling technologies, and attempts to store the information in a manner adhering to as many W3C recommendations as possible. The Semantic Logger's utility is grounded in two context-based applications, namely a recommender system, and a photo-annotation tool