Addressing the challenge of managing large-scale digital multimedia libraries

Traditional Digital Libraries require human editorial control over the lifecycles of digital objects contained therein. This imposes an inherent (human) overhead on the maintenance of these digital libraries, which becomes unwieldy once the number of important information units in the digital library becomes too large. A revised framework is needed for digital libraries that takes the onus off the editor and allows the digital library to directly control digital object lifecycles, by employing a set of transformation rules that operate directly on the digital objects themselves. In this paper we motivate and describe a revised digital library framework that utilises transformation rules to automatically optimise system resources. We evaluate this library in three scenarios and also outline how we could apply concepts from this revised framework to address other challenges for digital libraries and digital information access in general

Improving the usefulness of multimedia archives by applying data reduction techniques

In recent years, an increasing amount of personal images, video, sound and text data are captured and stored in a digital format. Increased storage capacity at lower cost entice us to attempt to store everything, but without effective information retrieval techniques, the usefulness of the data becomes limited. Some people have taken personal data capture to extremes and have begun to capture digitally all aspects of their life, which creates enormous archives of multimedia data. This is not a new idea: in 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote his visionary article “As We May Think” where he described Memex, the first Human Digital Memory (HDM). Today we have projects like Microsoft MyLifeBits building on the Memex vision, however there has been little focus on organizing this kind of data effectively. By applying data reduction, we show the benefits of removing redundancy from HDMs, and illustrate how the same data reduction framework can be used to effectively support information access from HDMs

DAVVI: A prototype for the next generation multimedia entertainment platform

In this demo, we present DAVVI, a prototype of the next generation multimedia entertainment platform. It delivers multi-quality video content in a torrent-similar way like known systems from Move Networks, Microsoft and Apple do. However, it also provides a brand new, personalized user experience. Through applied search, personalization and recommendation technologies, end-users can efficiently search and retrieve highlights and combine arbitrary events in a customized manner using drag and drop. The created playlists of video segments are then delivered back to the system to improve future search and recommendation results. Here, we demonstrate this system using a soccer example