In this paper we describe the Multimedia Documentation Lab (MDL1), a system which is capable of processing vast amounts of data typically gathered from open sources in instructured form and in diverse formats. A sequence of processing steps analyzing the audio, video and textual content of the input is carried out. The resulting output is made available for search and retrieval, analysis and visualization on a next generation media server. The system can serve as a search platform across open, closed or secured networks. MDL can be used as a tool for situational awareness, information sharing or risk assessment, allowing the integration of multimedia content into the analysis process of security relevant affairs.
Interactive video is increasingly becoming a more and more dominant feature of our media platforms. Especially due to the popular YouTube annotations framework, integrating graphical annotations in a video has become very fashionable these days. However, the current options are limited to a few graphical shapes for which the user can define as good as no dynamic behaviour. Despite the enormous demand for easy-creatable, interactive video there are no such advanced tools available.
In this article we describe an innovative approach, to realize dynamics and interactivity of video annotations. First we explain basic concepts of video-markup like the generic element model and visual descriptors. After that we introduce the event-tree model, which can be used to define event-handling in an interactive video formally as well as visually. By combining these basic concepts, we can give an effective tool to the video community for realizing interactive and dynamic video in a simple, intuitive and focused way.
One of the core challenges for current landscape of ontology based research is to develop efficient ontology merging algorithms which can resolve the mismatches with no or minimum human intervention, and generate automatic global merged ontology on-the-fly to fulfil the needs of automated enterprise business applications and mediation based data warehousing. This paper presents our approach of ontology merging in context of data warehousing by mediation that aims at building analysis contexts on-the-fly. Our methodology is based on the combination of the statistical aspect represented by the hierarchical clustering technique and the inference mechanism. It generates the global ontology automatically by four steps. First, it builds classes of equivalent entities of different categories (concepts, properties, instances) by applying a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Secondly, it makes inference on detected classes to find new axioms, and solves synonymy and homonymy conflicts. This step also consists of generating sets of concept pairs from ontology hierarchies, such as the first component subsumes the second one. Third, it merges different sets together, and uses classes of synonyms and sets of concept pairs to solve semantic conflicts in the global set of concept pairs. Finally, it transforms this set to a new hierarchy, which represents the global ontology.
There are plenty of projects aimed at incorporating semantic information into present day document processing. The main problem is their real-world usability. E-learning is one of the areas which can take advantage of the semantically described documents. In this paper we would like to introduce a framework of cooperating tools which can help extract, store, visualize semantics in this area.
In this paper a modular authoring system for interactive videos is introduced. The system enables the author to edit the video and add annotations like images, text, hyperlinks to defined scenes or the whole video. It provides a video cutting tool to define scenes, a scene graph to realize non-linear flow of the video and a HTML editor to create text and link annotations. A project can be exported to a XML formatted file with a specific schema and Flash video format (flv) files, which can be interpreted by the project’s player. The system is designed to be used intuitively.
Thematic portals are sites where subject matter experts select and organize information and, consequently, they can be described as top-bottom structures. While challenging this schema, implementing social information retrieval systems and social network representation features can improve user experience and the dissemination impact of the portal. We analyse the characteristics of social software and review examples of utilisation of these technologies that can be applied in an educational technology thematic portal.
Recently, the information community has seen the emergence of user-centric media applications, which are characterized by the central position given to the user. To fulfill the user-centric promise, it is necessary to understand and model the actions of the users of the system. This position paper presents a methodology for modeling the behavior of multimedia database users. To this end, we propose to analyze the query logs to derive the classes of behaviors of a user. The presented method bases on the characteristics of user queries and on taxonomies. The behaviors are established using a query classification algorithm.
Social media sharing sites such as Flickr or YouTube have become immensely popular. Besides sharing actual content, users also share annotations describing or classifying the contents they publish. Although tagging is easy, annotation still is a laborious task that can be made easier by suggesting meaningful additional tags to the user automatically. In this position paper we propose a system architecture and process for supporting annotation by tag suggestion to increase the quality and quantity of social annotations. The goal is not to tag previously untagged images in a completely automatic way, but instead to extend the amount and completeness of annotations by supporting the user in the process of adding further tags.
In today’s information environments, tagging is widely used to provide informationabout arbitrary types of digital resources. This information is created by end users with different motivations and for different kinds of purposes. When aiming to support users in the tagging process, these differences play an important role. This paper discusses several approaches to generate tag recommendations, and a prototypical recommender system for the social resource sharing platform ALOE will be presented.
This interactive system allows users to control the generation of the recommendations by selecting the sources to be used as well as their impact. The component was introduced at DFKI, and a first evaluation showed that the recommender component was considered as helpful by a majority of users.
Story-telling has been a means of bequeathing knowledge since aeons. Whereas the idea of the story-telling remains unaltered, the world around undertakes continuous changes. New media, new technologies and devices, new ways of communication define a new format of the story-telling. This paper proposes a new non-linear version of mobile story-telling in the emerging ubiquity of knowledge sharing. To support our concept we provide a description of multimedia services based on the MPEG-7 metadata standard used for our non-linear mobile story-telling environment.
A user-centric architecture of infotainment content adaptation to the context is presented. The architecture uses component technologies in term of business logic and functionalities offered by social web (OpenID, FOAF) and semantic descriptions of MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. Technological alternatives are discussed and adapted to the specificity of vehicle applications in terms of scalability and platform mobility. The requirements of the architecture are motivated by the presentation of a scenario.
The Web 2.0 philosophy has brought new ways of using the web as a content repository and a sharing platform. Non-computer skilled people can now publish their own text, images, videos and/or sounds and take part in communities created around topics they like. It has also brought an opportunity to propose resources to a potentially huge audience. Indeed, a promotional video posted on YouTube can be watched by millions of users. That is why we wanted to know if it was possible to take advantage of this possibility to recruit testers for our music learning tool: our development is user centred, so it is important for us to have it evaluated by lots of testers. Until now, they were recruited in a geographically limited area, i.e Réunion Island. Therefore, we have set up an experiment called “E-guitar Sonar Edition” to gather information about this recruiting opportunity. The idea is thus to design a free downloadable version of our system (originally, it was a DVD), put it on a dedicated web site and have it promoted thanks to video sequences posted on YouTube and Dailymotion, the two majors video Web 2.0 sharing sites, the most appropriate services. This article presents the conditions and the process used. It also deals with the assessment part, the way we gather feedback and finally shows the firsts results. The experiment itself has no limit in time, so it is still currently running.
Web 2.0 platforms such as media sharing and social network sites (SNS) concern people in everyday life to a great extent. People are enabled to reach out to various media and up to now, it is nearly impossible to use digital identities ex ante or to recreate users’ identities ex post across different platforms. In this paper, we explore important methodologies in Web 2.0 such as cross-media analysis and social pattern based analysis based on a survey in this area, aiming at cross-platform information diffusion across social network sites. Open issues are discussed to explore the challenges and solutions in this new research area.
Today Online Social Networks (OSN) are very popular Web sites which show remarkable user growth and attention on the Internet. One reason of the extraordinary success of these social software sites are the enhanced Web 2.0 technologies and concepts, but they do not really explain why a OSN in particular produce explosive growth while another similar Web site is drying out. We belief that these socio-technical mass phenomena can be better understood by introducing self-organization theory (SOT) and crowd behavior. These concepts can explain why spontaneous collective- and herd behaviors may emerge and how the development of these processes could look like. However OSN should not only grow fast, they also want to stay sustainable and get profitable. Hence an important question of these potential “overshoot and collapse” Web sites on the Internet is how to get it stabilized and turned into a long lasting and successful service. Therefore we present some considerations about growth and sustainability in the dynamic and competitive online world.
Tagging is an extremely popular mechanism in many Web 2.0 applications to create metadata supporting search and retrieval of arbitrary multimedia information like digital images, video or audio. However, compared to the syndicated multimedia information itself, the metadata are still “sticky”. They cannot be accessed across several Web 2.0 applications, their semantic enrichment is not possible and they cannot be embedded in the local practices of communities of practice. Here, we present a multimedia tagging mechanism based on the international standard MPEG-7 for community-aware, standard compliant tagging of semantically enriched metadata implemented in the M7MT proof-of-concept application.
This paper describes the VAMP web application for the validation of MPEG-7 descriptions with respect to semantic constraints defined in a profile. The semantic constraints are formalised using an ontology and a set of rules.
We present the Publication Platform, a component of the PrestoSpace1 project, which provides retrieval and browsing functionalities of enriched audio-visual material. The Prestospace Factory is a system for enriching audio-visual documents in order to provide automated content and semantic analysis.The Publication Platform provides a user interface for semantic queries and produces a Web page with the results of the AV analysis and additional information about related external documents.
Manual quality control of audiovisual content in the different steps of the media production, delivery and archiving process causes significant costs. Semi-automatic quality control requires automatisation of quality analysis, quality metadata interoperability and efficient visualisation tools. In this paper we propose the use of MPEG-7 for standard compliant description of media quality metadata and a quality summary visualisation tool which facilitates efficient exploration of visually impaired content by the user.
The task of creating specific references rests on specifications that qualify how parts of resources can be addressed. The lack of standards for fragment identifiers has lead to the problem that links, metadata and references merely point to whole resources. Although it is suggested that fragment identification is specified with a media type’s MIME type registration, there are few formats that provide a fragment identification scheme. Furthermore formats that specify fragment identification schemes have not agreed on a common set of requirements. In this paper we present an overview of the current status of interoperable fragment definitions, point out promising activities that promote interoperable fragment definitions and suggest strategies to promote uniform fragment identifiers. Additionally a set of requirements is defined and described to ease the development of fragment identification standards.
We present an innovative approach that treats the right management metadata as metric objects, enabling similarity search on IPR attributes between digital items. We show how the content base similarity search can help both the user to deal with a huge amount of similar items with different licenses and the content providers to detect fake copies or illegal uses. Our aim is the management of the metadata related to the Digital Rights in centralized systems or networks with indexing capabilities for both text and similarity searches, providing the basic infrastructure enabling the private use and the commercial exploitation as well.
Along with the rapid increase of available multimedia data, comes the proliferation of objectionable content such as violence and pornography. We need efficient tools for automatically identifying, classifying and filtering out harmful or undesirable video content for the protection of sensitive user groups (e.g. children). In this paper we present a multimodal approach towards the identification and semantic analysis of violent content in video data. We propose a layered architecture and focus on ontological and knowledge engineering aspects of video analysis. We demonstrate the development
of two ontologies defining violent hints hierarchy that low level analysis, in visual and audio modality, respectively should identify. A violence domain ontology, as a reality representation, defines higher-level semantics. Taking under consideration extracted violent hints, spatio-temporal relations and behaviour patterns higher-level semantics automatic inference is possible.
The Web 2.0 philosophy has brought new ways of using the web as a content repository and a sharing platform. Non-computer skilled people can now publish their own text, images, videos and/or sounds and take part in communities created around topics they like. Our idea is thus to use this new communication mechanism to assist skill learning. Skill is indeed a difficult knowledge to learn on a text form as it is hard to describe movements, gestures or procedures in this way: sometime, a picture or a video is better than a thousand of words.
As a popular field of experience, we have focused our attention on music learning, and more particularly on guitar pieces learning. Music is very representative of skill learning, it is both a physical and an intellectual activity. The “Gloss2U” service we describe in this article takes into account the specificities of this learning process, especially as events are time-related.
To achieve this, we rely on new equipment conditions that are nowadays gathered. Userfriendly multimedia tools opened new horizons and broadband networks (ADSL, cable, …) are becoming more and more common. Almost everybody is a potential content producer with just a webcam or a cell phone. Our system is therefore audio and video based and users interact with each others by submitting contributions, called glosses, in the context of the piece they are learning. A dialogue starts between student users (learners) and experimented ones (professors), to discuss encountered problems and the way to solve them. The other strength of this system is that it can act as a knowledge repository for forthcoming practitioners.
Due to a shift in the marketing focus from mass to micro markets, the importance of one-to-one communication in advertising has increased. Interactive media provide possible answers to this shift. However, missing standards in payment models for interactive media are a hurdle in the further development. The paper reviews interactive advertising payment models. Furthermore, it adapts the popular FCB grid as a tool for both advertisers and publishers or broadcasters to examine effective interactive payment models.
Abstract: In this paper a novel form of online users, the “Online Crowds”, is described. “Online Crowds” gather virtually, behave and act collectively and produce effects and phenomena which would not be possible without the Internet [Hof 05]. A remarkable example is “The Million Dollar Homepage”1 where a clever student made more than £ 100.000 only by offering a simple but unique online idea. He used the dynamics between online users and companies to make money with almost no effort. To understand these “social contagion” processes, an interdisciplinary conceptual and psychological model of “Online Crowds” is introduced. The model is based on the principles of “Other directedness”, “Critical mass”, “Positive feedback loops” and the accelerating impact of network effects on the Internet. Some recommendations are sketched how such “Online Crowds” can be actively formed for promising online business models. If the behavior and the characteristics of “Online Crowds” are better understood, decision makers and providers will be better capable to predict and promote successful online communities and services.
Moreover a look at the positive and negative effects of these phenomena is taken and their challenges, as well as the implications for the affected society are analyzed. Especially the domain of New Media Technology (NMT) and the particular area of online recommender- and personalization technology are facing a potential for exploiting these Internet phenomena. Finally, a list of related work in the field and an outlook on further improvements in
the discussed approach are given.
Abstract: User generated content published via weblogs (also known as blogs) has gained importance in the last years, and the number of globally available weblogs increases. However, a large fraction of these show low publishing activity and are rarely read. This paper is a quantitative analysis of success factors in a community of over 15.000 weblogs, hosted by a local Austrian newspaper. We looked at publishing activity by content type, community activity and writing style. Also, the interconnectedness of the community was analyzed.
The digital media and games industry is one of the biggest IT based industries worldwide. Recent observations therein showed that current production workflows may be potentially improved as multimedia objects are mostly created from scratch due to insufficient reusability capacities of existing tools. In this paper we provide reasons for that, provide a potential solution based on semantic technologies, show the potential of ontologies, and provide scenarios for the application of semantic technologies in the digital media and games industry.
With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies a new attitude towards processing contents in the Internet has emerged. Nowadays it is a lot easier to create, share and retrieve multimedia contents on the Web. However, with the increasing amount in contents the retrieval process becomes more complex and often leads to inadequate search results. One main reason is summarized easily: Approaches to image clustering and retrieval usually either stick solely to the images’ low-level features or their semantic tags. However, this is frequently inappropriate since the “real” semantics of an image can only be derived from the combination of low-level features and semantic tags. Consequently, we investigated a more holistic view on semantics based on a system called Imagesemantics that tries to close the gap between both approaches by combining them.
In this work we propose how to deal with the Semantic Gap in closed domains. That is, we propose to bridge the Semantic Gap by means of mapping wellknown low-level feature patterns found in MPEG-7 descriptions to formal concepts. The key contributions of the proposed approach are (i) the utilisation of ontologies, and rules to enhance the retrieval capabilities (effectiveness), and (ii) the realisation of the feature matching process being carried out on the structural level through indexed MPEG-7 descriptions (efficiency). We discuss advantages and shortcomings of our approach, and illustrate its application in the realm of non-linear, interactive movie productions.
Today the availability of digital media content is well established and widespread. Not only commercial content distribution is a big market, but also user driven digital multimedia content is produced and shared in big communities. There is an increasing need to automatically categorize media such as music or pictures and more general to provide intelligent mechanisms for easier navigation, search and retrieval within huge distributed content repositories. One of the metadata standards that has been established to describe multimedia content via metadata is MPEG-7.
This international standard facilitates many application domains and is probably the richest multimedia metadata set available today. However, one of the key issues is to provide an almost automatic annotation of multimedia data in respect to low-level (e.g., color, shape, audio signature, etc.) as well as high-level (e.g., object recognition, event recognition, etc.) features. This work investigates and analyzes currently available MPEG-7 annotation tools and summarizes their applicability and limitations.
Interactive digital TV is becoming a reality throughout the globe. The most important part of the picture is new services for the user, in terms of audio-video quality, but mostly in terms of entirely new content and interacting experience. To this end, we explore the potential of introduction of semantics in the distribution, processing and usage of the media content. We propose a smart iTV receiver framework capable of collecting, extending and processing (reasoning) semantic metadata related to the broadcast multimedia content. System architecture is presented along with an example service to illustrate the combination of semantic metadata, user preferences and external data sources.
This paper evaluates methods that can be used for effectively generating und utilizing intellectual capital reports (ICRs) for external and internal reporting as well as for internal knowledge-sensitive management decisions. Research is accompanied by a case study in a high-tech enterprise (Infineon Technologies Austria AG). An intellectual capital report controlling process has been developed. The findings of this research will be of use to all knowledge-based companies and institutions as they demonstrate how and why to measure intellectual capital. The paper discusses the proposed controlling system and the most important findings. An ICR is a multi-indicator system used to depict the development of intangible assets. As there are currently only unsatisfactory accounting guidelines for the reporting of intellectual capital available, an emphasis on techniques for selecting indicators for the report has been made. As a result, convincing reports for external addressees can be generated. Furthermore, methods for using this information as a foundation for knowledge-sensitive management decisions are drafted. The ideas presented in this paper are based on a master’s thesis written at Infineon Technologies Austria AG.
There are many technologies calling themselves knowledge management systems in the market but most of them deal only with information management. The main difference between them is that knowledge management systems are oriented into people and participated in tacit knowledge capturing. The paper describes set of information technologies which could take part in all process of knowledge management and especially in collecting tacit knowledge.
Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are a new paradigm in IT-management. This paper presents an SOA-implementation in the intranet portal of a 520-employee research institute, which was launched to accompany parallel knowledge-management (KM) activities. Furthermore it explains the benefits of an SOA-based IT-landscape for KM-activities.
The visualization of temporal information should not be seen as a special case. A lot of applications take advantage of the time factor (e.g. capturing user events). In general recorded activities on a workstation can be seen as a temporal database and so can profit from a time-based visual output system too. We introduce a model which classifies the time as a ”first class citizen” in today’s operating systems. Such an invention would not only improve and standardize the capturing of temporal events but it would be of benefit for a temporal visualization system too. Within a 3D visualization space and a global time axis we introduce a printf4D() method. With this method it is possible to display images, videos, text strings or any other kinds of information in an automatically animated way. As a first proposal we demonstrate this function in a ”flow of information” metaphor where information-objects are not displayed all at once but in a flowing manner over a certain period of time. Additionally we will show that printf4D() is not limited to temporal data. It can be extended automatically to any kind of static information.
Explicit knowledge is often stored in various repositories within a company. As APOSDLE aims at considering the whole intellectual capital of companies, we are coping with the task to integrate the content of several and different repositories within the APOSDLE platform. Further, other modules in the APOSDLE system also require functionality to semantically enrich knowledge artefacts like documents or multimedia objects. In this paper, we present our approach to these challenges, namely the “Multimedia, Multi-source, Metadatabased Knowledge Artefact Repository”. After presenting the basic idea and critical issues of this solution, we point out related technological approaches as well as their limitations. Finally, we report about a first prototype realising this idea and our experiences gained so far.
The evolution of our society to the knowledge based society has raised new challenges for most of the scientific domains that exist. The higher importance given to knowledge extraction instead of getting just information (i.e. data included in a context) hast led to the development of several intelligent techniques for knowledge discovery. This paper shows some examples of using the techniques of case-based reasoning and data-mining for knowledge discovery in the knowledge management system of an university. We have taken as example, the educational domain with the particular case of universities as they represent good examples of organizations that acquire, generate, store and use knowledge for various purposes, teaching, learning and research.
Today, Web Based Training (WBT) starts to be widely used as a new way of teaching. Unfortunately, this mode of teaching imposes new requirements and constraints. It has made the creation of learning materials a complex and demanding task for the instructors because it takes much time and demands a multitude of skills, in particular technical skills that must be developed and continuously updated. Hence, we propose a collaborative authoring methodology based on division of labor as a way to produce WBTs where the processes of production are clearly separated to meet the existing and needed skills of persons involved in WBT production. This paper presents an efficient method to support instructor’s guidance during the first phase of the WBT production called the Macro Design using the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and taxonomies we developed.
The knowledge is defined as combination and organization of data and information in given context and Knowledge Management (KM) provides capturing, storing and reusing of knowledge objects. In Web 2.0 world the knowledge is represented in form of microcontent object and KM 2.0 proposes creation, sharing and leveraging the microknowledge in a collaborative way. The microknowledge in Web 2.0 network can be controlled through designing the instructional strategies that will provide user learning paths and activities and that will give possibilities for sharing of those same learning activities and microknowledge with others. The present paper is aimed to reflect of the research needs and the new challenges in the mentioned above three areas: KM, Web 2.0 technologies and Learning Design (LD). It is focused on designing of personalized learning using IMS LD elements. The paper analyzes the possibilities of applying Web 2.0 technologies for defining a broaden set of activities and creating the rich environments with microknowledge objects and web services in one successful scenario.
This paper discusses the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible Knowledge Management solutions. The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources. Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approachesin order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and it is used here as the basis for a sample realization of an appropriate framework.
The success of multimedia enabled community engines depends on a careful design of the digital media and the related communication/collaboration tools. However, the semantics of the multimedia contents in community communication and collaboration is hard to capture and complex to compute. With the opportunities given by the combination of metadata descriptions standards like MPEG-7 and server-side content-based computations, the manageability of multimedia semantics in community engines becomes more feasible. As a proof of concept, we introduce a Lightweight Application Server for MPEG-7 Services (LAS) which is deployed for a web-based high-level semantic annotation tool for arbitrary images.
The POLYMNIA project aims to develop an intelligent cross-media platform for personalized leisure and entertainment in theme parks or recreation venues. The visitors of the theme park are – on request – identified, tracked and recorded individually in order to create personalised photos and videos documenting the visit. One specific problem in this system is the identification of humans across different cameras and under varying environmental conditions. We use the MPEG-7 Colour Structure Descriptor (CSD) for this purpose which has been reported to perform well for this application. We propose a new distance function for the CSD, the weighted city block distance. Evaluation shows that the new matching function yields better results than the distance proposed in the standard.
Digitalisation of TV broadcast (Digital Terrestrial Television, DTT) is going to modify the way of work of many local televisions and content providers. In Catalonia (northeast of Spain) this will certainly happen since many current channels will not get a DTT license to broadcast. In this context, they need to get facilities for content selling and interchange in order to cover more audience and be able to use new different distribution channels, like second generation Internet. The “Xarxa IP Audiovisual de Catalunya” (XAC, Audiovisual IP Network of Catalonia) project aims to develop a marketplace for television content providers, defining mechanisms for searching, cataloguing and selling television programs in a secure way, also considering Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues. It must be noted that the project also considers other audiovisual content providers, such as the educational ones. In order to be able to perform searches over heterogeneous environments, a metadata set (XAC-MS) has been defined. Alignment of XAC-MS with standards like MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and TV-Anytime has been done to promote future standardisation of the metadata set.
European mobility initiatives encourage students to study abroad, but experiences of intercultural and professional learning during the stay abroad do not flow back and the direct exchange between these students is not supported. In this article we want to present our concept and experiences with the tool weblog supporting students of Social Work during their placements abroad.
Information Realisation is the process of presenting data as Textual, Graphical or Audial information to a human user. In this paper, we discuss the importance of this concept with respect to the accessibility of Semantic Web data to a diverse target audience. We provide an ontological point of view, defining the expressive characteristics and application domain of representation formats, thus presenting a system which produces representations customised to the user environment and the nature of the source data. Our approach considers the semantics of the data, not just the structure, and aims to present the information in the most semantically appropriate manner for the given target environment. We provide examples of a simple data set being realised as popular target representation formats: textual (XHTML, RSS); graphical (SVG, X3D); and audial (SoundML, VoiceXML).
The intranet portal of a company is often used as supporting tool for Knowledge Management (KM), e.g. in conjunction with yellow pages, knowledge maps, document storage systems and information retrieval. But although KM generally is considered to be important, it often does not get off the ground. One of the reasons is a lack of steady marketing. This paper points out the fundamental importance of the intranet entry page to permanently market internal KM-activities in order to make them part of the staff’s thinking and daily work by presenting results of a case study made in the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.
Digital non-linear story-telling is an ideal approach to share knowledge in large distributed communities and networks. Story-telling combines semantic knowledge and episodic knowledge by explicit problem solving strategies. To facilitate knowledge sharing authoring environments based on multimedia repositories as well as advanced story players are needed. Interoperability with existing information systems can be enhanced by relying on multimedia description standards like MPEG-7 and the use of W3C standard conform community hosting engines. We present an environment for sharing entrepreneurial knowledge by high quality video taped interview sequences from well-known high-tech entrepreneurs.
This paper presents an applocation called Visual Browser that is able to visualize RDF data. It explains the advantage of the RDF/RDFS as well as the way RDF triples are displayed in the visualisation process. One of the most importand features of the programm comprises a two level visualization – the data and the so-called perspective of view. The scope of this architecture is shown on examples. Two very different domains are visualized: WordNet and a Universal information Robot’s knowldege base.
Knowledge creation processes in the cultural sciences have a discursive nature. The cultural scientists participating in these discourses build a community of practice. Reifications in information systems should support four concepts: (1) Content description by metadata, (2) coverage within standards, (3) repository technologies, and (4) platform independence of applications. By the combination of these concepts information systems support cultural scientists to extract and manage knowledge about high-level semantics of multimedia artifacts in open repositories with metadata annotations. Basic support for the latter can be achieved by a loose classification scheme as in Dublin Core, but with more sophisticated MPEG-7 description elements for time based media. We present a system called MEDINA for semi-automatic Dublin Core to MPEG-7 conversion to maintain media already annotated in Dublin Core.
A number of recent studies have contributed to Knowledge Management (KM) and E-learning integration. They are mainly based on organizational learning analysis. In this paper, KM is discussed from the viewpoint of adaptation in e-learning systems. The main components of adaptive e-learning system are discussed with respect to the KM processes. We analyze users and developers of adaptive e-learning systems and the knowledge, with which they operate. We present our view of knowledge and meta-knowledge concepts in the context of adaptive elearning systems. The role of meta-knowledge as a contextual knowledge is emphasized for adaptation in e-learning. The paper discusses the challenges of KM in adaptive e-learning systems and analyses the main KM processes that should be introduced in adaptive e-learning systems.
Although mobile knowledge management is being perceived as an emerging R&D field, its concepts and approaches are not well-settled, as opposed to the general field of knowledge management. In this paper, we try to fill this gap by establishing a definition for mKM, specifying the abstract use cases of mKM systems, and introducing a reference model as a basis for verifying and comparing concepts and system architectures.
Despite all technological progress there are still handicaps that need to be taken into consideration when thinking of introducing and using e-learning scenarios: On one hand, not yet everybody is equipped with technology enabling high-speed internet connections and acceptable data transfer rates. In such cases long response times and slow download processes do not motivate the e-learner. On the other hand, not everybody really wants to learn anywhere and at anytime, but wishes to meet people and have personal contacts instead. Therefore, a hybrid delivery of learning combining remote components with face-to-face settings seems to be an appropriate way of making use of educational technology according to individual possibilities and needs. It allows (i) to be as flexible as different technological standards, personal attitudes and pedagogical scenarios require, and also (ii) to continuously adapt learning environments to changing needs from the content, technological and pedagogical points of view. The challenge consists in deciding what to deliver best in which way. This paper presents an e-learning environment tailor-made to the specific needs of education and training in logistics and discusses how this became part of a hybrid learning experience.
E-learning at the workplace might be accompanied by synchronous cooperative learning episodes of small groups using net-based communication. In a field study carried out in a large software company an interaction of factors determining the quality of such cooperative learning was observed. In this study, a software tool was used which supported a specific instructional design by phase-specific delivering of instructions and learning materials as well as by means of process control (including turn-taking, role assignment, and coordination of task flow). There was no tutor or instructor present in the learning sessions. The learning processes of six small groups were evaluated on the basis of a content analysis. Results demonstrate a high amount of topic-oriented contributions and the realization of the expected learning activities. It was concluded that the learning processes were successful because of the fine-grained implementation of the instructional design in the software tool. However, feedback data indicated a low acceptance of the software tool. Participants evaluated the process control as being restrictive. It was assumed that there was a non-optimal interaction between the factors technology and target group / context in the study.
The discovery of relevant knowledge resources is a remaining problem in large enterprises, where the same problems are often addressed in different locations. In this paper, we propose an enabling infrastructure, which can succcessfully help in discovering personally relevant learning resources (e. g. electronic documents, colleagues, seminars). By using our mobile gotchi framework (MGF), matching between learning requirements and learning resources is improved. The basic idea is autonomous information exchange between agents acting on behalf of their users to proactively find appropriate resources to support daily problem-solving and learning. By sharing personal profiles in an enterprise-specific ontology network, which is autonomously updated, corporate knowledge flows are more transparently represented.
Recent trends in structure and content of global knowledge spaces present new challenges to the field of Knowledge Discovery. Very large, highly structured repositories are increasingly replacing smaller, flat information spaces. Such repositories are often filled with multimedia documents, including image, audio and video data. This publication briefly outlines the underlying trends and discusses implications on approaches to Knowledge Discovery. Some examples for applications accomodating these implications are presented and analysed for lessons learned which can be incorporated in designing future Knowledge Discovery systems. Emphasis is given to the visualisation of hierarchical structures and to cross-media knowledge mining, two fields crucial for adressing future challenges to Knowledge Discovery.
In this paper, an integrated information system is presented that offers enhanced search and retrieval capabilities to users of heterogeneous digital audiovisual (a/v) archives. This innovative system exploits the advances in handlings a/v content and related metadata, as introduced by MPEG-4 and worked out by MPEG-7, to offer advanced services characterized by the tri-fold ”semantic phrasing of the request (query)”, ”unified handling” and ”personalized response”. The proposed system is targeting the intelligent extraction of semantic information from a/v and text related data taking into account the nature of the queries that users my issue, and the context determined by user profiles. It also provides a personalization process of the response in order to provide end-users with desired information. From a technical point of view, the FAETHON system plays the role of an intermediate access server residing between the end users and multiple heterogeneous audiovisual archives organized according to the new MPEG standards.
Knowledge management case studies in most cases focus on one or a few applications. Typically, the discussion is limited to what has been found out in the past. On the other hand, numerous authors have reported on the technological aspects at a high level of abstraction, where no specific business cases were taken into account. There are polls and surveys to identify potential future trends, but these typically investigate a serious of market segments without making specific statements about KM in the automotive industry. In this paper we hope to bridge this gap: in order to identify the potential benefits of KM, we will survey some of the literature describing recent, current, as well as expected future developments in the automotive industry. In particular, expand on three key trends in order to discuss potential benefits from Collaborative KM: the supply chain, improvements in engine development, and providing the industry with skilled workers. We found that the following are interesting applications from the point of view of Collaborative KM: (1) collaborative partner extranets (to support the supply chain), (2) inter-company collaboration, training to be tied into every-day work, KM to support Quality Management (to assist in the improvements of engine performance), and (3) e-learning combined with helpdesk automation and a knowledge base (in order to help provide the industry with skilled workers).
Cooperative learning is characterized by communication and interaction in a group. The computer supported cooperative/collaborative learning (CSCL) is a specific form, which removes previous spatial and temporal restrictions. Starting point of the examinations are known learning processes and their possible support by a CSCL system. The meaning of different user models as well as different styles and roles of learning are analyzed in CSCL systems and shown in different scenarios supporting cooperative or collaborative learning processes. The practical evaluation of the methods and algorithms was done by an adaptive CSCL system to support learning effects on the domain of software engineering.
This paper presents an approach to supporting the exchange of knowledge in communities of practice that connect experts from different fields of expertise. The developed system allows unobtrusive construction of personalised knowledge maps that capture implicit knowledge of individuals and groups of users and make it usable for collaborative structuring of shared information repositories. The personalised maps also reflect the global patterns of knowledge exchange in the community which allows the extraction of a shared conceptual structure that connects knowledge across different individuals and groups of users. To this end techniques for self-organised clustering are combined with methods for supervised learning and collaborative filtering. Application scenarios include automatic generation of personalised knowledge portals, collaborative knowledge management and the construction of shared ontologies and topic networks. The real-world testbed is the Internet platfom netzspannung.org.
This article outlines new technologies in the areas of automated expertise finding, expert network discover, virtual place-based collaboration, and automated question answering. We illustrate each of these areas with implemented and in some cases empirically evaluated systems. Collectively, these illustrate new methods for automatic discovery of knowledge, experts, and communities in an effective and efficient manner.
This paper describes our vision for the near future in digital content analysis as it relates to the creation, verification, and presentation of knowledge. We focus on how visualization enables humans to make discoveries and gain knowledge. Visualization, in this context, is not just the picture representing the data but also a two-way interaction between humans and their information resources for the purposes of knowledge discovery, verification, and the sharing of knowledge with others. We present visual interaction and analysis examples to demonstrate how one current visualization tool analyzes large, diverse collections of text. This is followed by lessons learned and the presentation of a core concept for a new human information discourse.
Humans are not able to cope with the exponential growth of information and the increasing speed of information and business processes fostered by information and communication technologies. Technical support not only for information storage and retrieval but also for information selection, process planning, and decision support is needed. Most of the ICT investments, however, do not foster innovation or productivity. Recent studies show that ICT-based training is the main instrument of knowledge management. On-line media and selfdirected learning environments are among the most effective training solutions in terms of cost, time and logistics. In the last few years, the percentage of employees participating in training courses increased. At the same time, there has been a decline of training budgets. E-Learning is able to deliver more valuable training for less money only if it is part of an integrated knowledge and skills management system. Two case studies of knowledge and meta data management systems are discussed.