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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.