Section: Overall Objectives

Scientific objectives

LinkMedia investigates a number of key issues related to multimedia collections structured with explicit links: Can we discover what characterizes a collection and makes its coherence? Are there repeating motifs that create natural links and which deserve characterization and semantic interpretation? How to explicitly create links from pairwise distances? What structure should a linked collection have? How do we explain the semantic of a link? How explicit links can be used to improve information retrieval? To improve user experience? In this general framework, the global objective of LinkMedia is to develop the scientific, methodological and technological foundations facilitating or automating the creation, the description and the exploitation of multimedia collections structured with explicit links. In particular, we target a number of key contributions in the following areas:

• developing efficient methods dedicated to multimedia indexing and unsupervised motif discovery: efficiently comparing content items on a large scale and finding repeating motifs in an unsupervised manner are two key ingredients of multimedia linking based on a low-level representation of the content;

• improving techniques for structuring and semantic description: better description of multimedia content at a semantic—i.e., human interpretable—level, making explicit the implicit structure when it exists, is still required to make the most of multimedia data and to facilitate the creation of links to a precise target at a semantic level;

• designing and experimenting approaches to multimedia content linking and collection structuring: exploiting low-level and semantic content-based proximity to create explicit links within a collection requires specific methodology departing from pairwise comparison and must be confronted with real data;

• studying new paradigms for the exploitation of linked multimedia content as well as new usages: explicit links within media content collections change how such data is processed by machines and ultimately consumed by humans in ways that have yet to be invented and studied.