NoTube was a three-year EU-funded research project about the future of TV, based on use cases around personalisation, the Web, and social networking. The project started in March 2009 and finished in January 2012. It was conducted by an international consortium.
The project aims to demonstrate how Semantic Web technologies can be used as a tool to connect TV content and the Web through Linked Open Data, as part of the wider trend of TV and Web convergence. By specifying protocols and APIs to support a variety of realistic user scenarios for experiencing future TV, NoTube offers a novel contribution to the TV media world. Read more about the project’s goals and research topics.
Semantic technologies are a field of standards and technologies which allow a machine-understandable and machine-processable representation of the meaning of digital content, which can be used to create more intelligent, responsive and personalised applications. In NoTube we apply these technologies for two main purposes:
- Semantic annotation: in the media and television area semantic annotations can enable new types of application which know what users want, and what programmes describe, so that we can build more intelligent services. See related research topics.
- User interests from the Social Web: knowledge extractable from a person’s TV viewing activity and Social Web presence (on Twitter, Facebook etc.) can enable a semantic application to implicitly determine their interests, and match them to TV programmes. See related research topics.
The work in the project is steered by three use cases:
The project is producing code, prototypes, mockups and papers iteratively with results for three communities:
- The technical community: NoTube is developing APIs and technical services for re-use by content providers and broadcasters, programmers interested in APIs and software components, and technical staff working in TV/Social Web start-ups.
- The scientific community: NoTube is conducting research that will apply to researchers interested in standards, protocols, access policies, and privacy.
- End users: NoTube is prototyping applications that help users to choose what to watch, and which integrate TV watching with the Web: such as bookmarking TV programmes or parts of TV programmes and sharing them as part of the Social Web.