Cultural Units of Learning<br/>- Tools and Services

Based on the standardised specific data structure (EMMO - Enhanced Multimedia Meta Object) developed by the project, it is possible to develop standardised transformation tools that will take an EMMO compliant, structured information space and render it in various presentation and layout engines. The technical partners have developed a framework for transformation tools so that the partners themselves or any third party (possibly through licensing schemes) can develop specific converters from the EMMO-standard to other presentation standards. The partners in CULTOS have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach by building a converter to the SMIL presentation language, including some enhancements in order to cater for interactivity which is not yet part of the SMIL-2 standard. Furthermore, a converter to a web based presentation has been realized. The potential application domain of this result can be any structured information source pertaining to the idea of a "Semantic Web". The end user is any user of the prospective "Semantic Web". The market Sector/Size: Horizontal market (i.e. domain independent), but also segmentable by application domains because each EMMO holds a knowledge model (ontology) that distinguishes its content from other EMMOs. Potential Barriers: Non-acceptance of EMMOs as an open standard, lack of support for the open interfaces proposed in the EMMO definition; proprietary extensions to EMMOs. Critical Success Factors: Convincing showcases in an industrial setting, to show the applicability of the current results in a business domain.

The model for Enhanced Multimedia Meta Objects (EMMOs) was developed from the intuition that in a knowledge and content sharing economy, different applications would need to adhere to open standards with respect to the containers that knowledge and media objects are delivered in. The idea was to standardise a number of interfaces that such container objects would require. Examples are interfaces for querying the ontology, for accessing digital rights information, and for adding further knowledge to an existing EMMO, using different authoring tools. The project developed a formal model of EMMOs whose most important characteristic is the ability to combine three views on the semantics of content: - Media related semantics (as covered by the MPEG standards), - Domain specific semantics (as expressed in a domain specific ontology), - Functional semantics (i.e. the formal operations available to access or manipulate the EMMO). The EMMO model can be regarded as an enrichment layer on top of standard database technology. The fundamental idea underlying the concept of Emmos is that an Emmo is an object unifying three different aspects of multimedia content, namely the media aspect, the semantic aspect, and the functional aspect. In the following, the Emmo idea is compared with other approaches to the representation of multimedia content and show that the idea of unifying these three aspects is unique. Inter-relating basic media objects like single images and videos to form multimedia content is the task of multimedia document models. Recently, several standards for multimedia document models have emerged [3], such as HTML [24], XHTML+SMIL [21], HyTime [14], MHEG-5 [10], MPEG-4 BIFS and XMT [23], SMIL [1], and SVG [8]. Multimedia document models can be regarded as composite media formats that model the presentation of multimedia content by arranging basic media objects according to temporal, spatial, and interaction relationships. They thus mainly address the media aspect of multimedia content. Compared to Emmos, however, multimedia document models neither interrelate multimedia content according to semantic aspects nor do they allow providing functionality on the content. They rely on external applications like presentation engines for reasonable content processing. In parallel to research concerning the Semantic Web, a variety of standards have appeared that can be used to model multimedia content by describing the information it conveys on a semantic level, such as RDF [18, 4], Topic Maps [15], MPEG-7 (especially MPEG-7 s graph tools for the description of content semantics [12]), and Conceptual Graphs [16]. These standards clearly cover the semantic aspect of multimedia content. In summary, these standards - since they also offer means of addressing media objects within a description - undoubtedly refer to the media aspect of multimedia content as well. Compared to Emmos, however, these approaches do not provide specific functionality on multimedia content. They rely on external software like database and knowledge base technology, search engines, user agents, etc. for the processing of content descriptions. Furthermore, media descriptions and the media objects described are separate entities potentially scattered around different places on the Internet created and maintained by different and unrelated authorities not necessarily aware of each other and not necessarily synchronized whereas Emmos combine media objects and their semantic relationships into a single unit.

The multimedia knowledge authoring tools combine knowledge models with authoring facilities as known from Web-Publishing Software. This is viewed as critical enhancement of current technology in order to build content for the proposed "Semantic Web". These tools may be use in any domain which requires structured and navigable multimedia content e.g. maintenance manuals for complex machinery, but also multimedia storytelling with user-navigable scripts. Potential users of these tools are multimedia authors and any digital content publishers. The potential market sector and size are estimated to be very large. Potential Barriers: Multimedia authoring tools in general and broadcasting (digital editing) software have already attained a high level of maturity but do not have the capacity for ontological mark-up. Our tools, on the other hand, will not be able to achieve the high level of maturity in terms of multimedia capabilities (e.g. digital effects; flash; support for codices; compression techniques; streaming techniques).

Showcases have been constructed, enabling the work with multimedia entities (e.g. research) and the demonstration (e.g. teaching) of their connectivities, in the fields of: - Cultural Studies (e.g. cognitive concepts of European capitals; meta-communication through contemporary music), - European Heritage (e.g. tourism sites related to European tradition), - Literature (e.g. internal and external relations of Yiddish poems), - Marketing (Advertisements from the perspective of relevant psychological theories). Negotiations have started at the UN with doCip (documentation centre in Geneva, charged by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations) concerning the use of the CULTOS software. Cooperation with the GWG (Gesellschaft fur wissenschaftliche Gerichtspsychologie, Munich) has been established. The CULTOS software is going to be used for visualising family relations and adjacent psychological issues. Cooperation with SR, Mercatis, i-views, Klett, and TAU has been agreed with the perspective of constructing software fit for - The expected EU child custody law, - For psychological evaluation and legal expertises, - For teaching.

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