Hypervideo playout

The experience on the end device will be based on an intuitive hypervideo browser which will ease and encourage interaction with the viewed content. Viewers will be able to select in-frame objects, explore the concept(s) represented, browse to related concepts and access from concepts to related media presentations and Web content.

A prototypical hypervideo player for a Web browser has been developed on top of a set of Red Bull videos.

ConnectME will provide hypervideo playout for desktop, mobile and TV platforms.

Hypervideo annotation

ConnectME is developing a Web-based hypervideo annotation tool. The user interface will therefore seek to use open standards like HTML5. The tool will allow a user to load a video, acquire an automated annotation with concepts, revise and extend that annotation, as well as define and edit (in a guided fashion) the presentation templates to be used with the concepts in the annotation.

Linked Data

The Linked Data initiative (http://www.linkeddata.org), as well as the W3C Semantic Web effort, is generating increasing amounts of structured, machine processable data about things (concepts) and digital content on the Web. Also, within various W3C and MPEG initiatives, recommendations based on open Web standards are being made for different aspects necessary for a Web-based hypervideo, such as media annotation, media identification, media query and multimedia presentation. Thus ConnectME is timed to take advantage of emerging standards and approaches on the Web to launch Connected Media Experiences and ensure their success as part of the future rich media Web.

Explaining this, the Linked Data initiative encourages the publication of public data on the Web using a structured semantic metadata format (RDF) and agreed URLs to unambiguously identify concepts. This data is then made accessible by a Web API (e.g. through the REST interface to Web content which is based on HTTP calls, and SPARQL as the call payload which is a semantic query language over RDF). ConnectME can thus make use of existing Linked Data services on the Web (the so-called Linked Data cloud is continually growing) as well as store its own generated semantic data (e.g. which can be generated automatically out of relational databases using defined mappings) to offer project-internal endpoints (e.g. to data from the business partners).

Linked Media

Conceptual identification and interrelationships included in the annotation of video materials will be handled by building on the Open Linked Data schema which is providing Web scale metadata about concepts. The resulting web of interlinked multimedia annotations will form a Linked Media layer on the Web, allowing systems to find media related to concepts or identify concepts based on similar media.

The key principles of Linked Media are:

1. Web media needs to be annotated in terms of its online parts
2. Web media needs to be annotated with terms which represent a shared understanding of a domain or identification of a thing
3. Web media needs to be annotated using a media ontology which supports the above two issues
4. The expressed representation of different concepts by different media fragments in different ways shall be the basis to interlink media across the Web

LMF - Linked Media Framework

The Linked Media Framework is an easy-to-setup server application that bundles central Semantic Web technologies to offer advanced services. The Linked Media Framework consists of LMF Core and LMF Modules.

LMF Core

The core component of the Linked Media Framework is a Linked Data Server that allows to expose data following the Linked Data Principles. The Linked Data Server implemented as part of the LMF goes beyond the Linked Data principles by extending them with Linked Data Updates and by integrating management of metadata and content and making both accessible in a uniform way.

LMF Modules

As extension for the LMF Core, we are working on a number of optional modules that can be used to extend the functionality of the Linked Media Server:

• LMF Permissions implements and extends the WebID and WebACL specifications for standards-conforming authentication and access control in the Linked Media Framework.* LMF Enhancer offers semantic enhancement of content by analysing textual and media content; the LMF Enhancer will build upon UIMA, Apache Tika, and our own Apache Stanbol framework
• LMF Media Interlinking will implement support for multimedia interlinking based on the work in the W3C Multimedia Fragments WG and the W3C Multimedia Annotations WG
• LMF Reasoner implements a rule-based reasoner that allows to process Datalog-style rules over RDF triples; the LMF Reasoner will be based on the reasoning component developed in the KiWi? project, the predecessor of the LMF

• LMF Versioning implements versioning of metadata updates; versioning itself is already carried out by LMF Core, but the management of versions will be carried out by this module
• LMF Enhancer offers semantic enhancement of content by analysing textual and media content; the LMF Enhancer will build upon UIMA, Apache Tika, and our own Apache Stanbol framework

CMF - Connected Media Framework

The ConnectME framework wraps the data management capabilities of the Linked Media Framework and orchestrates the ConnectME services into an end-to-end workflow over that data, providing a consistent access to those orchestrations to tools such as the hypermedia annotation suite and browser.