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INFORMATION
PHAROS – Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources across Online Spaces
got Lost in the Sea of Audio-visual Objects?
Let PHAROS guide Your Way!
With the spread of Web2.0, more and more
individual users start uploading audiovisual
objects to the Web. The enormous – and still
continuously growing – amount of audiovisual
content, provided both by users and content
Motivation
Worldwide, the volume of stored information is growing
exponentially, and an increasing share is audiovisual content.
This content drives the demand for new services,
making audiovisual search one of the major challenges for
organizations and businesses today. Confronted with the
growing variety of audiovisual formats, standards and tools,
a coherent approach to the search for audiovisual objects
is desired. Furthermore, the sheer volume of online audiovisual
objects leads to scalability, as well as user intent and
satisfaction issues in multimedia retrieval.
Challenges
There are many challenges in efficiently and effectively
searching of audiovisual objects. The aspects addressed by
the PHAROS platform include, but are not limited to:
• Intelligent content publishing mechanisms – making
data collection of audiovisual resources more scalable.
• Automatic semantic annotation of audiovisual content –
making retrieval of audiovisual content easier.
• Advanced schema-agnostic search – exploiting metadata
of different formats for enriching search and search
results.
• Context-awareness and personalization – providing appropriate
results for a specific user and a specific task.
• Innovative user interfaces – going beyond simple keyword
search boxes.
PHAROS
FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM L3S L3S RESEARCH CENTER
providers, poses huge challenges for multimedia
search. PHAROS aims to improve users’
multimedia experiences by collectively taking
into account content characteristics, metadata
and user-supplied knowledge.
The Pharos Project is present at the European ICT
2008 Exhibit, “Europe’s biggest research event for
information and communication technologies”.
The Pharos Team displays a demonstration of the
current technical achievements of the Project and
promotes the Pharos Federation to potentially
interested partners, both in the industry and in
academia. A further showcase will be conducted
in january 2009 to gather user feedback and validate
functions.
• Content protection – allowing for appropriate business
models for content providers.
• Spam detection – getting relevant and reliable search
results and recommendations.
Highlights
During the second 12 months of PHAROS project, sophisticated
algorithms, as well as engineering issues are addressed
to fulfill the goals of this platform. Particularly, Prof. Nejdl,
from L3S, acts as scientific director and coordinates the
research in the areas of Social Media and Search, Advanced
Personalization and Ranking. A prototype called “Social
Media Beta” has been successfully released in June 2008.
This prototype consists of several offline modules focusing
on social media analysis, including user and community