Practitioner Session: Multimedia Content Access and Europeana

Aim of this Practitioner Session is to to exchange knowledge regarding the online accessibility of audiovisual collections. It will serve as a starting point for the definition of a research agenda that defines the role Content-Based Multimedia Indexing can play within Europeana.

Context
The greatest promise of the internet as a public knowledge repository is to create seamless access for anyone, anywhere, to all knowledge and cultural products ever produced by mankind. Mainly due to increased bandwidth availability, web sites offering online video material have managed to mature and in a short period have become extremely popular.

It is evident that the potential for releasing material from audiovisual archives online is enormous. However, from the many millions of hours in these archives online a few percent can be found online. Semantic multimedia content analysis, organisation, retrieval and presentation will play a vital role in providing continuous access to audiovisual heritage.

Europeana
One of Europe’s current most important initiatives is the construction of the European Digital Library (Europeana), which aims at making Europe's diverse cultural and scientific heritage (books, films, maps, photographs, music, etc.) easy to access and use for work, leisure, or study. Europeana is taking advantage of existing rich European heritage, including multicultural and multilingual environments, of technological advances and of new business models. It is generating a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed digital cultural heritage, including all types of multimedia cultural content, and all types of cultural institutions, including libraries, museums, archives. The short-term objective of Euroepana has been to create a prototype within 2008, providing multilingual access to over 2 million digital objects through www.europeana.eu. The long-term objective, for 2010 is to increase the available digital content to over 10 million digital objects from all types of institutions, i.e., libraries, museums, audiovisual organizations, archives.

Audiovisual archives need to overcome several obstacles before they can set up meaningful online services and provide content to Europeana.

• Interoperability between heterogeneous collections.
  The basic level of interoperability between collections concerns the conceptual level of metadata, which tend to vary greatly across countries and institutions for industrial, technological, cultural and historical reasons. Annotation is time consuming, thus costly and only provides access on programme or item-level, not on shot level.
• Interoperability at a technical level due to different formats and standards.
  There are many migration and transcoding standards in use. It is key to define a best-suited strategy. Also, technical preconditions have been put into place to enable access though Europeana.
• Well-defined and tested scenarios for multicultural and multilingual use of audiovisual content by various user groups.
  Archives that aim to offer online access need to collaborate with end-users (representing different user groups) in specifying and evaluating the functionality of services they provide.
• IPR issues.
  Online access is closely tied to issues of copyright. Intellectual Property Rights issues make it difficult to show archive material publicly. Different national legislations make international exchange of audiovisual material even more difficult.
• Lack of contextualisation.
  Without context and frameworks for interpretation, a cultural and material understanding of selected content remains limited for users.

Organisers:
Stefanos Kollias, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Vassilis Tzouvaras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Johan Oomen, Sound and Vision, The Netherlands
Sjoerd Siebinga, Europeana, The Netherlands

Invited speakers:
The International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) aims at bringing together the various communities involved in the different aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, such as image processing and information retrieval with current industrial trends and developments. In the framework of CBMI, a practitioner session on “Multimedia Content Access and Europeana is organized that aims at bringing together the CBMI research community, leading audiovisual archives and FP7 and eContentplus projects that contribute to providing meaningful access to audiovisual collections, more specifically within the scope of Europeana.

Confirmed Participants:
Europeana: Sjoerd Siebinga (Europeana office, Netherlands)
Video Active: Johan Oomen (Sound and Vision, Netherlands), Vassilis Tzouvaras (NTUA, Greece)
PrestoPrime and Linked Data: Wolfgang Halb (Joanneum Research, Austria)
European Film Gateway: Georg Eckes (Deutsches Filminstitut, Germany)
NoTube: Lora Aroyo (VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Imagination and Multimedia Retrieval: Yannis Avrithis (NTUA, Greece)

Session Chair:
Stefanos Kollias

Program
11:30 - 11:40	Session Kick-off
11:40 - 12:00	Europeana
12:00 - 12:20	Video Active, Euscreen
12:20 - 12:40	PrestoPrime
12:40 - 13:00	EFG
13:00 - 13:20	NoTube
13:20 - 13:35	Imagination
13:35 - 14:00	Discussion, Conclusions

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