Transcript
Ryan Shaw Final Project Proposal December 3, 2004
For my final project, I propose to design and implement Media Streams MetaData eXchange (MSMDX), a collaborative video annotation and editing system for the web. Project Description The purpose of MSMDX is to create web-native infrastructure and tools for interacting with video information. Users will be able to annotate, re-edit and re-use video content in a networked, collaborative fashion. Key user groups include fan communities, video bloggers, and independent journalists. The goal is to develop a social content engine for video on the web. Social content engines are services that exploit the aggregation of content and metadata created by distributed groups of users to enable new patterns of use. These services amplify the descriptive effort of individual users for the benefit of all users, and have proven to be successful in encouraging useful annotation behavior. One simple example is CDDB, which aggregates user-contributed music CD metadata to allow players and devices to “magically” display artist names and track titles. More recent (and more sophisticated) examples include Amazon’s Listmania, MusicBrainz, the del.icio.us “social bookmarking” engine and Flickr photo sharing services . The social content engine will consist of:
Modular, machine-readable ontologies for describing multimedia content
A desktop tool for associating annotations expressed using this ontology with arbitrary video documents
A web-based interface for browsing and searching using these annotations
A plug-in for or extensions to an existing video editing tool that will enable the use of these annotations for simple re-editing
I will also attempt to establish a set of “best practices” for publishing and syndicating multimedia documents on the web in ways that minimize opaqueness. Wherever possible these
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Ryan Shaw Final Project Proposal December 3, 2004
tools and practices will utilize open standards to ensure maximum interoperability. For more details, see the project web site at http://msmdx.net. Project Rationale The MSMDX project integrates a number of different SIMS areas of interest, including knowledge representation for media, digital media production and reuse, information retrieval system design, distributed systems design, human-computer interaction, communities of knowledge, and intellectual property law (since it will enable the creation and distribution of derivatives of copyrighted works). In this regard, it will put into practice the wide variety of knowledge and skills I have learned during my two years at SIMS. I hope to show that a project of this nature is best pursued in the kind of multi-disciplinary space that SIMS provides. Team Members Ryan Shaw is a second-year SIMS Master’s student. MSMDX is his Final Project to fulfill the requirements for the MIMS degree. He will be responsible for managing the project, defining its direction and providing software engineering expertise. Chitra Madhwacharyula is a first-year SIMS Master’s student who has applied to enter the SIMS PhD program in Fall 2005. She has experience building XML-based video metadata editing systems and will help design the system architecture. Patrick Schmitz has been working on multimedia platforms, authoring and variations on that theme for over 20 years. He has applied to enter the SIMS Master’s program in Fall 2005. Patrick will provide expertise on user models, runtimes and tools for timeline editing and presentation of multimedia, as well as the integration of multimedia and Semantic Web technologies. In addition to these core team members, there are a number of designers and engineers in the Bay Area and open source community who are interested in contributing to this project. They have already provided a great deal of useful feedback on the proposed project, and I expect that their skills and experience will be invaluable during the implementation phase.
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Ryan Shaw Final Project Proposal December 3, 2004
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