M-Advantage - Multimedia - Automatic Digital Video & Audio Network Through Advanced Publishing European Service

The research and development efforts within the M-ADVANTAGE project described in this paper aim at increasing the competitiveness of Europe's digital content industries by semantic-based services across the content value chain, including personalized delivery. Nowadays, user needs are addressed by costly solutions that require intensive human intervention. The described activities strive at filling the gap in automatic processing of multimedia by creating an intelligent infrastructure allowing considerable productivity gains. For achieving this goal, it is proposed to carry out a tightly integrated research and development activities also in terms of the blend of research, technology, content and user partners involved. The research and development targets to build a service infrastructure for automated semantic discovery, extraction, sunmiarization, labelling, composition, and personalized delivery of content from heterogeneous multimedia repositories. This will involve foundational research such as data models and ontologies required for merging multiple heterogeneous data types into an integral representation; component-level research for parts of the service infrastructure; as well as development of semantic-based productivity tools. Making use of established Semantic Web, multimedia description and other standards are anticipated to enable a broad uptake of M-ADVANTAGE's open source and non proprietary technologies. While the project's research & technology partners include leading university centres and industry players (including SMEs), on the content side renowned private as well as public organisations are involved. They hold and provide access to all types of content such as audiovisual, stock image archives, news agency and other content, and strive to develop and market knowledge-based content services. 200 Proceedings ofIASW-2005