22/11/2006

An innovative technology which will allow the automatic extraction of knowledge from multimedia content on the Internet and its integration into intelligent information services is expected to be developed within the framework of the research project ΒΟΕΜΙΕ (Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction), which is being coordinated by the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of the National Centre of Scientific Research-NCSR "Dimokritos". For the first time in history, the project will combine multimedia indexing technology with technology based on knowledge, aiming at solving the problem of uncontrolled information on the Internet.

ΒΟΕΜΙΕ is being carried out by research foundations and companies in Germany, Italy, Holland and Greece (NCSR "Dimokritos" and the Centre for Research & Technology Hellas-CERTH) that are active in the sector of knowledge and information management. It is co-funded by the 6th EU Framework Programme for Research ("Information Society Technology" programme - IST), whereas the total budget amounts to 5 million euro for three years.

The project is based on digital map technologies, which have been developed by TeleAtlas N.V. and the indexing tool iFinder by the German company Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. In particular, through the digital maps, information will be extracted on sports events held in major European cities, which in turn will be added to a variety of multimedia content and will be accessible to the public through a user-friendly interface. The intelligent and flexible multimedia content search will be made through the indexing tool, iFinder, which will be enriched with semantic processing capabilities.

In recent years, serious efforts have been made regarding the automatic retrieval of information from visual content. What makes BOEMIE different is the emphasis it gives to extracting knowledge, which is based on a multimedia semantic model so that the information is precise. It can then be combined with different source types (text, video, image, audio) and can be constantly enriched. The development of such a technology is expected to have applications in several sectors such as commerce, tourism, e-science etc.

Source: NCSR "Dimokritos"