3rd K-Space General Meeting
28-30 August 2006, Graz (Austria)
Author: Zeljko, Raphael
CWI participants: Zeljko, Raphael
# participants: around 40
Table of Contents
Overall impression
It was a very useful meeting! The NoE is going well, many demonstrators are developped and show
already some nice results. For CWI, the following collaborations are on the way:
- Zeljko talked with Alan Smeaton (DCU) for the
Special Issue on Canonical Processes of Media Production. It is possible that a student from DCU
visit CWI for some weeks.
- CWI and JRS will continue to collaborate in two directions:
- Formalizing the MPEG-7 profiles. We will continue the work done in the SAMT paper, extending to
other profiles and offering a full service that check the semantic validity of any MPEG-7 descriptions
and guess its flavor (i.e. according to which profiles it is compliant with ...). A submission to
ESWC'07 is targetted.
- Developing an ontology-based annotation tool for videos. JRS has already a prototype that
we will receive very soon. The idea is to think about how the interface could evolve to include
ontology-based annotations
- CWI is collaborating with QMUL in its "Content Management and Retrieval System". We will
mainly develop a query expansion module based on some terminological resources (work done by Zeljko)
- CWI plan to collaborate with Glasgow University: they have developped a kind of personal
recommending system for photos and they are very interested in the CHIP project. They have already
conducted some user studies and they would like to exchange ideas of how storing user profiles, etc.
They would like to invite Lloyd to give a talk in GU.
- CWI will host for 2 weeks two PhD from Koblenz University in September for working on
the multimedia ontology developped by K-Space.
I have presented the results of the
Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group.
See my slides.
Summary of Action Points
- 2006-09-15: Email to Krishna for specification of the Query Expansion module in WP4.5
- 2006-09-15: Determine which MPEG-7 descriptors are needed for the annotation tool prototypes
(JRS, KU, ITI, CWI)
- 2006-09-22: CWI to distribute the TOC of D5.3
- 2006-09-29: ALL to comment and agree on the TOC of D5.3
- 2006-10-06: Alia to design the front page of the
SMaRT cluster web site
- 2006-10-15: CWI to provide outline, decide on wether to include NewsML work in D5.1
- 2006-11-15: Initial contribution for D4.5 send to Krishna
- 2006-11-15: ALL to provide the chapters for D5.3
- 2006-11-30: CWI to provide a complete draft of D5.3
- CWI to bring and present a K-Space Poster at ISWC
Most of the APs assigned in Amsterdam and Athens meetings are done.
Deliverable due to M12 (for CWI, D5.3): they are due by the end of December. Craig obtained 45 days
delay that he will use to make good review of the documents. In the action points, CWI has scheduled
to have the first complete draft of D5.3 by the 30th of November.
Milestone due to M12: Milestone are generally pieces of software. They should be available online and
for download at the dates assigned to be considered as complete.
IMPORTANT: big misunderstanding on the current allocation table of PM per
partner. Actually, the number written cover the whole duration of K-Space (36 months) and not only
the first 18 months as we thought. Consequently, we should report less PM in each bi-monthly report
since on the current speed, we will have consumed all our PM by Month 27 (instead of 36 !).
Preparing the Review: the Financial Report for the full year 2006 should be ready for January 1st 2007,
be ready ! Margriet should be aware of that ...
- Academic exchange: 7 exchanges (5 PhD + 2 researchers)
- Industrial placement: list of companies compiled, a flyer is available. It is also
possible for a senior researcher to go one week in a company, does some kind of "consulting" and get
a fellow (money) for that ...
- Shared teaching resources: a web-based application will be available at M12
- European Master and PhD Program (Erasmus)
- Summer School (SSMS), Chaikidiliki: 78 participants (on ~100 applications). The criteria
for accepting the candidates was the relevance of their PhD with respect to the themes of the Summer
School...
Nice demonstration of a Segmenter Tool: it includes 3 different segmentation algorithms
(DCU, JRS, GET) and 2 more are expected (ITI, EURECOM).
It allows to segment a single image, a repository of images, or key-frames from a video sequence.
The result of the segmentation is saved in a PNG file (labelled images) but an MPEG-7 output
description is planned. The results seem to be quite good.
The tool should be available in the SVN repository for download. Otherwise, it can be downloaded
from here with the user
/ password (kspacerep / kspace2006)
An evaluation with ground-truth results is scheduled in order to compare the various segmentation
algorithms. The tool will also be able to track moving region.
Content Description: discussion and future plans
- Description Specification Repository: public service for accessing MPEG-7 examples, text,
XSD, profile definition, etc.
- MPEG-7 Document Sharing/Management
- MPEG-7 Document Validation: public service for syntactic and semantic validation (profile)
Formalizing Semantics of MPEG-7 profiles description: presentation of the work done by CWI and
JRS (the SAMT paper). Next step to formalize more constraints of DAVP and other profiles. Improve
the definitions of the profiles.
I had after discussions with JRS and we are already preparing the ESWC'2007 paper about that !
WP4.1 - Multimedia ontology
See
the slides
for WP4.1.
A major decision has been taken: the D&S pattern and the OIO pattern of DOLCE will be followed
to model the ontology.
WP4.1 - Annotation Tool
Demonstration of M-OntoMat-Annotizer:
- Current version v0.54, but only v0.52 is available on aceMedia web site. See
http://www.acemedia.org/aceMedia/results/software/m-ontomat-annotizer.html
- Handle RDFS ontology only, extension to OWL ontology planned by the end of the year
- Characteristics: feature extraction, manual ontology-based annotation, useful for making
very precise annotation (at the region level) and produce ground truth results for automatic
analysis.
- Remark from Steffen Staab: it is not aimed to be a personal management photo tool!
VERY NICE demonstration of JRS Video Annotation Tool:
You will find the
slides here !
I will get some binaries very soon so everybody can play with it.
- Audio-Visual content analysis: shot boundaries, key frames, camera motions, faces, visual
shot similarity, technical metadata, stripe images, motion activity, etc.
- Semantic analysis: segmentation (scenes, news stories), segment classification,
occurence of named entities, synopsis
- Manual Temporal content structuring: shot, scene, any temporal segment, hierarchical
- Manual annotation: thesaurus, ontlology, classification schemes
WP4.4 - Mining techniques
Lack of collaboration in this task. GU has made everything (mainly the PhD work of
Jana Urban)
WP4.5 - Relevance feedback
See
the slides
for WP4.5.
Demonstration of QMUL Content Management and Retrieval System:
- Work through a Web Interface (but some bugs in the demo)
- Introduce new content into K-Space: basic metadata (Dublin Core type)
- Automatic analysis of the video: store the metadata in MPEG-7
- Possiblity to do (controlled) textual annotation (keyword), following the MPEG-7
semantics DS
- Search interface to the image database by either another image (image similarity)
or keyword-based
CWI Contribution could be to expand any keyword-based query using some terminological resources
like WordNet, re-using here the work done by Zeljko.
WP 5.1 - Language Extension
The following TOC has been proposed for the Deliverable 5.1 (due M12):
1 Introduction (KU, All)
2 Datatype extensions (ITI)
3 Fuzzy OWL (ITI)
2.1 Motivation
2.2 Description of the Extension
2.3 Application to Multimedia Annotation
2.4 Related Work
2.5 Future Work
4 Named Contexts (KU)
[...]
[5 NewsML (CWI): review of Semantic Web infrastructure] <-- ISSUE ?
6 Design Patterns vor Multimedia Annnotation (UEP)
7 Compatibility of the Extensions (ITI, KU, CWI, UEP)
8 Conclusion (KU, All)
WP 5.2 - Metadata Store
After some discussions (Sesame 2.0 or Jena), Sesame 2.0 will be the K-Space RDF metadata store.
WP 5.3 - Semantic Multimedia
I have presented the
following slides.
During the plenary meeting, I have presented /facet.
Simon (KU) has presented SemFs, a virtual filesystem for
accessing RDF metadata.
Features:
- Browse annotation using the filesystem access annotated information objects as files.
- Access to semantic metadata from all legacy applications.
Architecture:
- Change of Linux file system
- Metadata repository + traditional file storage
- Internally, architecture for browsing and filtering (fixed) + depending on object to browse,
filters that correspond to domain dependent queries
- The idea is when data is placed in a directory, file is automatically annotated with the
metadata for that directory
- Adding semantic metadata do not require reprogramming
Demonstration:
- RDF graph describing relations among files and tags
- Each of the tags is represented as a subdirectory
- Entering subdirectories as query refinement, similar to facet browsing paradigm
- Similarly for smartWeb data set the same is done for football players
- Paper at IKNOW2006
- Prototype using an ontology describing taggings of files
- Download for KU website
- Applications: more easier and intuitive annotation backward compatible with traditional
filesytem interaction.
The action plan for the deliverable D5.3 is the following:
- AP 5.3.1: CWI: distribute the TOC of D5.3 by 22/09/2006
- AP 5.3.2: ALL: comment and agree on the TOC of D5.3 by 29/09/2006
- AP 5.3.3: ALL: chapters due to 15/11/2006
- AP 5.3.4: CWI: first complete draft of D5.3 by 30/11/2006
WP7.1 - Webpage
- K-Space Deliverables and Internal Deliverables could/should be public:
advert Krishna for publication
- Journal and Conference papers: Send http URL of the paper along with the references of the
accepted publication to Krishna (George, can you update the information on our internal web site?)
- Shared teaching resources: need for licencing the material (cc licence ?)
- IST Award for the best EU Project web site (10 000 euros price). K-Space will make
the challenge in order to get comments.
- SMaRT cluster exists! http://www.smart-network.eu
Needs volunteer for the design of the cluster Web Site. Alia offers her service :-)
SMaRT: AP for CWI (Alia) to make the front page of the cluster web site (due to 06/10/2006)
Discussions about NM2 that could join the cluster
- IST Event, Helsinki, November: K-Space has been accepted in the exibition session ;
SMaRT might be accepted in the network session
- Translation (and hosting) of the Web site: (French on the way), needs for volunteers for other
languages. Will be discussed during the TMC meeting.
WP7.2 - Newsletter, Brochure, Poster
- Issue 2 is due for M12 (December)
- Content: Summer School, Interview with PO, Interview with either IAB and SAB, TRECVid results,
IST Conference, Report on Standardization Activities, Report on Invited Talks (special sessions), Job
adverts (academic and industrial), etc.
- Update the brochure ? Mention the leading role of SMaRT
WP7.3 - Scientific Forum
Need for vote: Verein, Stichting (Dutch model of Stiftung), or EEIG (the European dimension).
Two candidates survive: i) Verein: model of the Semantic Web Association; ii) Stichting: means,
host in Netherlands !
WP7.4 - Book
TOC needed for the first K-Space book (due to 30/09/2006).
- D8.1: Objective Tree. The deliverable has been produced and delivered. No comments from the
PO.
- D8.2: Annual review. Comments for preparation
The Pre-review is scheduled during SAMT in December.
Review of previous Action Points
- K-Space would like to be active in MPEG and JPEG activities (particularly JPEG-Search !). K-Space
cannot be a member of MPEG, because membership is based on countries or legal entities. QMUL, EPFL,
and TUB among others participate in MPEG activities.
- There are a new activity in the MPEG-7 consortium:
MPEG-7 Query Format
(
draft call for proposal, deadline January 2007)
- There are now 3 repositories that will be linked soon from the K-Space web site: QMUL SVN
repository for documents, TUB repository for shared teaching resources, and DCU repository for TRECVid
development.
IST event
Four serious candidates demonstrators:
- M-OntoMat-Annotizer (KU, ITI)
- TRECVid Search and Retrieval Interface (ALL)
- QMUL Interface for Image Classification (QMUL, CWI, JRS, TUB?, GET?)
- DCU Video Segmenter (DCU, QMUL, ...)
IST Event: Thierry (DFKI), Vassilis (ITI), Craig and Ivan (QMUL), Jan (UEP), JRS and INA will be present
Project pre-review: a summary of the forthcoming review
- Monday 4th December: preparation, K-Space plenary meeting
- Tuesday 5th December: pre-review with PO (1-2 persons per partner)
- Wednesday 6th December: TMC meeting
Project review
- Presentations of our activity (1/2 day)
- Definition of the workplan for the next 18 months
- Most likely end of February, Beginning of January: Craig has to contact the PO for
finding dates. Place should be Queen Mary (London)
External Management Issues
Currently in SMaRT:
K-Space,
aceMedia,
MESH,
3DTV,
Muscle,
Salero,
XMedia,
AIM@SHAPE
Question marks for: MMKM (UK Project) ?
NM2 (EU IP) ?
IM2 (Switzerland Research Project for 12 years) ?