LINKMEDIA

The challenge that multimedia faces today is that of context awareness, i.e., describing documents in the context in which they appear (context of a collection, social context, etc.). Following this line of thought, the seminal idea of LinkMedia is that of content-based media linking with the ultimate goal of enabling better multimedia applications and new innovative services. Taking a content-based perspective, we seek to create explicit links at different levels to better reflect the context: links at the signal level, e.g., with repeating patterns; links at a semantic level, e.g., to follow topics or stories; links at a paradigmatic level, e.g., to have further details or comments on a topic. LinkMedia investigates a number of key issues related to multimedia collections 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? Addressing such questions, our goal is to lay down scientific foundations for collection structuring by means of explicit links and to study new usages and content processing techniques induced by structured context-aware collections.