We’re proud to join a group of top notch organisations from both research and industry that are working to build and implement a full-fledged cross-media analysis platform.
We all know from our daily online experience that media contents are on the rise. Digital photography and DIY videos are part of our information diet: more than 71% of online adults use video-sharing sites on a regular basis and 46% of Internet users post original photos and videos.
While media contents increase in volume technologies for media analysis across different channels remain a tough challenge for many organisations around the World.
We as Insideout10 with our experience on semantic analysis developed in the past two years around our WordPress plugin WordLift and in partnership with our sister company Redlink (focused on developing a Platform-as-a-Service for Semantic Processing) are much aware that information extraction from multimedia documents is considerably harder than from textual documents. Text provides an underlying structure at both syntactical and semantic level; yes, multi-language semantic analysis is a huge topic and disambiguation remains a tough challenge for computer scientists but technologies like free-text search have been around for many years and do provide nowadays valuable means of information extraction. Media (being a photo, a video or an audio clip) on the other hand doesn’t have a common structure and it is fragmented: deriving a context out of photos representing the same “thing” (a person, a place, a brand) across different channels is not as easy as detecting the same “thing” in various textual documents (where you can use part-of-speech tagging and combine natural-language-processing algorithms with information available in the Linked Data Cloud).
MICO is a European Union Framework Programme 7 research and development project and it will bring a common model for combining different analysis techniques for media contents making these challenges far more easy than they are today. We’re planning to use the same semantic processing framework we use for text analysis (being Apache Stanbol, Apache Marmotta and Apache Solr – see here for more information) and combining it with state-of-the-art media extractors developed by the Fraunhofer Institute (a leading research institution in Europe well known for its invention of the MP3 audio format).
Key benefits for our clients and partners
Insideout10 (along with Interact Egypt and RealNetworks) will validate these technologies in our Online Video Platform Helix Cloud: a solution enterprises and telcos use for providing multi-screen video experiences across their networks (more info available here: Hybrid and OTT for Telco 3.0).
This will enable our clients the creation of value added services (content discovery, personalisation using the social graph, content augmentation, semantic advertising and more) that take advantage of the cross-media analysis MICO will provide. We are also planning to bring these enhancements to the blogging community using WordLift and our TV Plugin WeeoTV (used for the development of http://enel.tv).
Next steps
We’re currently gathering user-stories and technical requirements and we will keep pushing out updates and experiences in this area in the next coming months: our goal is to bring cross-media analysis to a next level while making these technologies as accessible as possible for organisations and developers around the World.
As usual we’re more than happy to hear your media-related stories and challenges you’re facing in today’s multimedia Internet.
Stay tuned!