DefiningImageAccess/Project/aceMedia
From ImageWeb
| DefiningImageAccess/Project/aceMedia | |
|---|---|
| homepage:=http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/index.html}} | |
| [[has sub-project::{{{Subproject}}}]]}} | |
| [[sub-project of::{{{Supproject}}}]]}} | |
| start date:=January 2004}} | |
| [[end date:={{{End date}}}]]}} | |
| Status:=active}} | |
| JISCProject:=false}} | |
| [[Image Materials:={{{ImageMaterials}}}]]}} | |
| Focus:=Metadata Creation and Metadata query}} | |
| [[Publishes::{{{Publishes}}}]]}} | |
| [[References::{{{References}}}]]}} | |
| [[Uses::{{{Uses}}}]]}} | |
| [[Creates::{{{Creates}}}]]}} | |
| [[Partner::{{{Partner}}}]]}} | |
| [[Contact::{{{Contact}}}]]}} | |
| Defining Image Access | DefiningImageAccess/RelatedWork |
aceMedia
- http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/index.html
- http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/project/index.html
- http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/files/document/aceMedia-Annual-public-report-2006.pdf
The aceMedia project is being undertaken by a sizeable consortium of academic, industrial product, content and service providers. The project started January 2004, and ends (when?). Based on the references, it has a clear Semantic Web angle, though that isn't obvious from the project description.
From http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/project/index.html:
- "aceMedia will build a system to extract and exploit meaning inherent to the content in order to automate annotation and to add functionality that makes it easier for all users to create, communicate, find, consume and re-use content"
- "aceMedia introduces the novel concept of the Autonomous Content Entity (ACE), which has three layers: content, its associated metadata, and an intelligence layer consisting of distributed functions that enable the content to instantiate itself according to its context (e.g. network, user terminal, user preferences)"
- "The ACE concept will be verified by two user focused application prototypes, enabled for both home network and mobile communication environments"
Of particular potential interest to us is their "Harmonization of Multimedia Ontologies activity":
- http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/reference/multimedia_ontology/index.html
- http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/files/multimedia_ontology/cfr/MM-Ontologies-Reqs-v1.3.pdf
- David Shotton's "Requirements for Scientific Images" was a contribution to this requirements gathering phase (http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/files/multimedia_ontology/cfr/Oxford_requirements_for_a_multimedia_ontology.zip)
- There appears to be some interesting work on video and image content analysis (Visual Content Detectors, VCD), though it's not clear to me that a broad project like this will achieve as much as more focused image analysis efforts. But, interesting for us, the content analysis is linked to Semantic Web style ontologies, so the derived information is, in principle, accessible by other web applications.
- A cornerstone of the project's work appears to be the idea of an Autonomous Content Entity (ACE), which appears to be a package of content, metadata and content handling functionality - a kind of generic media object. This is an interesting idea, but unless it is built substantially from existing standards or some overwhelming advantages are realized, I see little likelihood of it finding widespread adoption for research images and other media.
For information on project deliverables, see http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/results/index.html:
- The sole software deliverable to date is M-OntoMat-Annotizer: http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/results/software/m-ontomat-annotizer.html
- There's a list of publications here: http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/results/publications.html
I sense is that this is a large, sprawling project that may generate some useful results and ideas, but without any clear synergy between its various lines of enquiry, yet difficult to see how such a broad based project can do better than more focused research efforts. Discovering the many and various project activities from the web site can be a challenge: the front pages seem to have more hype than useful information. The 2006 annual public report seems to be a fair starting point. I anticipate that some useful tools could be developed by this project, but to date only one of the various software developments has been made publicly available.
With reference to "the novel concept of the Autonomous Content Entity (ACE)", there seems to be considerable overlap here with MPEG-21 (at least to the extent of packaging content and metadata, and to some extent with processing), yet I find there is no mention of MPEG-21 on the project's web site.
