MediãMāp aims at promoting new collaborative audiovisual production services using the network as a federative channel. The project includes new concepts using semantics and ontology elements adapted to the audiovisual world in order to create a high level contextual search engine and a new audiovisual web portal. This places the amateur user and creator of AV content as a new actor of the web TV life providing him/her with new tools to enhance the level of his/her production.
The need of semantic
To operate correctly, cultural industries (and in particular the audio-visual one) always had recourse to three operators:
- the human one (which creates information, handles semantics),
- the logic (which carries the storage treatments, which seeks via thesauri.) and
- the physic (which allows storage thanks to the media: the films, video K7 …).
During very a long time, it did not seem necessary to create a tool to split human and logic which were considered, in their role, like only one and even entity!
Indeed, the digitalization of the audio-visual chain was done without semantic models, the human one remained agent of the direction, interpretation; the relation to the machine remaining unchanged since the beginning of the Eighties.
In the same way the hybrid digitalization of the physical media at beginning of the year 90 did not modify the relationship between the three basic entities which operated the archive and which shared neither language, neither representation, nor common tools.
But on the other hand, the digitalization of the whole process of production caused a major rupture of the relations between these entities.
Because of the information processing and data “Essences” in DAM (Digital Asset Management) or NAS (Network Attached Storage) which integrates several applications under various controls, logic and physic have to cohabit henceforth in a same and new universe !
A new need appeared: inter-to operate, i.e. to exchange information of technical, logical but also semantic nature. The new objective is to collaborate in the integration of more complex tasks, i.e. to treat more important volumes, while seeking for a better quality of the exploration of the archives.
The new computer tools thus integrate a comprehension of the context via a semantic layer from which comprehension is then accessible either only to human but also to the machine!
To try to answer these challenges, many researchers of public institutions and private companies work with for the improvement of semantic technologies accessible to machines (Databases objects - search engines semantics – ontologies …).
Through these new technologies, audio-visual industry should profit from better tools from indexing, management of the processes … but also of mechanisms facilitating the exchange between different data-processing universes and sustainable information in preservation centers of archives.