But while there is a phenomenal amount of content, most of it is not that easy to find. Sure, text content can be skimmed or glanced, but audiovisual content has to be viewed in linear time. We cannot easily search inside a film or audio recording for relevant information.
That is changing, and one European project has created the first integrated platform for semantic search that can return results based on the content and context of film and audio files, as well as text.
But European researchers in the MESH project have developed an integrated platform which they say, for the first time, can combine semantic search – or search by the meaning of the words – and a host of associated tools to deliver more relevant information, from a wide variety of sources that can be accessed from an individual user.
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These technologies are becoming common in particular knowledge domains, and more are emerging every day, but most relate to the concepts behind text-based documents. The MESH platform sought to use semantic search for every type of media.
On the way, it created some cutting-edge technology. “Our automatic annotation for video, for example, is state of the art,” explains Pedro Concejero, coordinator of the MESH project.
“The annotation system is capable of identifying the general scene setting, such as whether a video is a studio shot or a shot recorded on location. With adequate training, it can also detect (within some error margins) the general topic of the video, such as a scene about an earthquake or a flood. It can also find a number of salient objects within the scene, such as persons or fire, but cannot yet identify consistently objects with great variations in shape or aspect.”
One of the major challenges of the project was a product of its own success: It annotated too much information!
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