Objective
The ECHO participating Institutions have unique collections of documentary films dating from the beginning of the century until the sixties. These collections are very precious since they document different aspects (social, cultural, political, economic) of life in four European countries during this period of time. The aim of the project is to develop a long-term reusable software infrastructure providing Web-based access to its film collection, and to set up and run an ECHO digital library service. The project will integrate state-of-the-art existing technologies, such as the informedia technology (developed by Carnegie Mellon University) and the media-archive technology (developed by Tecmath), and will extend them to support new advanced services (semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition, integration of non-English speech recognizers for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval, cross-language retrieval capabilities, automatic film summary creation, privacy and billing systems). The ECHO participating Institutions have unique collections of documentary films dating from the beginning of the century until the sixties. These collections are very precious since they document different aspects (social, cultural, political, economic) of life in four European countries during this period of time. The aim of the project is to develop a long-term reusable software infrastructure providing Web-based access to its film collection, and to set up and run an ECHO digital library service. The project will integrate state-of-the-art existing technologies, such as the informedia technology (developed by Carnegie Mellon University) and the media-archive technology (developed by Tecmath), and will extend them to support new advanced services (semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition, integration of non-English speech recognizers for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval, cross-language retrieval capabilities, automatic film summary creation, privacy and billing systems).
OBJECTIVES
The main objectives of the project are to develop a long-term reusable software infrastructure to support digital film archives, to provide Web-based access to collections of historical documentary films of great international value and to increase the productivity and cost effectiveness of producing digital film archives. The project will develop and demonstrate an open architecture approach to distributed digital film archive services. The open architecture will support service extensibility and interoperability. The distinct features of the ECHO system will be semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition from digital film information, non-English speech recognizers (Italian, French, Dutch) for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval, cross-language retrieval capabilities, intelligent access to digital films, automatic film summary creation, collection mechanisms, privacy and billing mechanisms.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
The project will follow an incremental approach to system development. The project plans to develop three prototypes with an increasing number of functionalities. The starting point of the project will be a system resulting from the integration of the informedia-media archive technologies. The first prototype will add to this system four speech recognition engines supporting the four collections of film material belonging to the project content providers. The first prototype will demonstrate an open system architecture for digital film archives with monolingual capabilities. The second prototype will add to the first prototype a metadata editor that will allow indexing of the film collections according to a common metadata model. The second prototype will support the interoperability of the four collections and content based searching and retrieval. The third prototype will add the collection, film summary, authentication, privacy and charging functionalities to the second prototype in order to provide the system full capabilities. The project will collect and analyze user requirements in relevant user communities. Then, a metadata model for film information will be defined and a metadata editor will be developed. In the next phase the collections of the four participating Archives will be evaluated so that meaningful and inter-related collections of documentary film can be made available on-line and indexing information, according to the metadata model, can be extracted semi-automatically from the original content material in order to make its retrieval more effective and efficient. In the subsequent phases the three system prototypes will be specified, developed and evaluated. The full capabilities system will be demonstrated in two application scenarios: an educational and an entertainment scenario. Finally, appropriate dissemination activities will be carried out and an Exploitation Plan will be produced.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
00185 ROMA
Italy