1 The Design of Multimedia Database Systems, for Use as Multidisciplinary, Cross-sector and Cross-cultural Educational Resources CAL2003, Belfast 9th April, 2003 Paul Shabajee (University of Bristol) Angela McFarlane (University of Bristol) Grainne Conole (University of Southampton)

2 Outline Online Multimedia Collections & Educational Potential ARKive-ERA (Educational Repurposing of Assets) Project The Challenge – Supporting Diverse ‘Communities’ Repurposing of Assets – Overview and How its Done Metadata – Necessary. But is it the Root of Anti-multiculturalism in Digital Collections? More problems with Metadata Components of a Solution? Conclusions

3 Digital Collections of Multimedia Millions of £ & $ invested in development of Digital Collections of… Priceless Historic and Cultural objects, Images and Films, 3D Environments, Places and things otherwise inaccessible Imagine: Millions of images, video, audio files accessible via the Web that can be used to support learning and teaching in any subject, phase of education, level of education, utilised to provide personalised learning resources for individuals…. Want maximum ‘educational’ value from of digital collections Future… Immersive 3D environments, ‘Wearable computing’, new forms of collaboration…

4 Digital Collections of Multimedia In the UK… e.g. ARKive Animal, Plant & Fungi multimedia profiles Phase 1 – 30,000 images, 900hrs video, audio… Funding - UK Heritage Lottery Fund (£1.6m), New Opportunities Fund (£0.5m), HP Labs ($2m for technology research), … Others… SCRAN, British Pathe… New Opportunities Lottery Fund projects, Commercial Organisations… ARKive-ERA (Educational Repurposing of Assets) Project – Investigating key issues in designing systems to provide diverse users with appropriate access to multimedia assets… Funded by HP Labs as in support of work with ARKive

5 Repurposing Maximising use of assets across range of groups and types of media…

6 Repurposing Pulling together resources from different sources… ps. don’t forget the copyright!

7 Repurposing – How? Human Computer Controlled Vocabularies - Consistency

8 A Simple Problem? Imagine that there is a database of 100,000 images of people in a wide variety of different settings The database is indexed using terms relating to identification of people (name, age,…) and event (time, place…) Now a milliner might see great potential for studying how people use hats. The database is likely to be a very useful resource, they could search to see how the style of hats has changed over time, or what types of hats are most popular and many more specific questions e.g. what percentage of women have bows on their hats? or wear a particular type hat at a particular time of year?… However the database is not indexed using the concept of 'hat'

9 The Challenge “If a tree falls in a forest…” "If an digital resource is in a database but can't be found, is it really there?” To all intents and purposes no! If you can’t find it, you can’t Repurpose it! It is all about metadata and related stuff! ARKive Collection, supplied by the Bruce Coleman Collection, photographer Allain Compost Non-textual assets are a BIG problem to describe comprehensively!

10 The Challenge Diverse perspectives on any single object, real or virtual. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) - there are more than 19,000 main headings The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) - contains about 120,000 terms covering objects, textual materials, images, architecture and material culture from antiquity to the present. UK National Curriculum (for schools) Metadata Schema contains some 2000 'subject keywords‘ Costs? Time? Expertise?

11 A Dilemma – Cultural Imposition! Developers want to enable all potential educational users to gain maximum benefit from the assets held in their database, They do not want to dictate or second guess how people might use a resource. However: in order to allow anyone to find anything, in a usable and effective manner - with finite time and budgets available to index assets-requires that specific choices of metadata terms to be used must be made, which in turn require assumptions about the users and likely uses to which the resource might be put! You don't want to (and can't) predict what your users will want to use the 'raw' multimedia assets for, but if you don't, your users can't get to the assets.

12 Metadata – Other Problems Computers Can’t Think – The Flying Bird Problem Human Knowledge Partial Contentious Changing ‘Languages’ sometimes don’t have simple one-to-one translations Applying Metadata to whole objects insufficient

13 Solutions? There is no ‘one’ answer – sets of tool sets… Thesauri – Relationships: If Concepts Overlap Synonymous To & Preferred Terms Broader/Narrower Concept Multilingual - Partial Equivalent, One-To-Many High Level Thesauri – Many different ‘subject areas’ but little detail Shared Ontologies – Formal Descriptions of Things and Their Relationships  a bit of a problem…Ontologies Auto-indexing tools: Concept extraction & image indexing Community Annotation … Better understanding and positive attitude to the needs of a diverse range of users

14 Conclusions The Design of Multimedia Database Systems, for Use as Multidisciplinary, Cross-sector and Cross-cultural Educational Resources – is problematic… There are serious and fundamental problems BUT there are evolving solutions… However it takes, planning, resources, time, lots of effort and much more research…

15 Questions

16 Machine Readable Ontologies Schreiber et al (2001), Ontology-Based Photo Annotation, IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, MAY/JUNE 2001

17 Machine Readable Ontologies Schreiber et al (2001), Ontology-Based Photo Annotation, IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, MAY/JUNE 2001