This proposal stems directly from the EPSRC Workshop held on 20 & 21 October 2010 "ICT Research - The Next Decade". It seeks to address the challenge of the navigation of time-based media collections and items throughout the content life-cycle, from creation to consumption. It will achieve this by establishing an open network of researchers from across academia and industry, who engage in workshops, sandpits and, most importantly, feasibility or path-finder mini-projects. These mini-projects have the aims not only of performing leading edge, early stage research that will lead on to larger proposals, but also of building a critical mass of researchers, whose expectation is to tackle significant challenges by collaborating. Other elements of this project are to create a Landscape document for the field, develop appropriate ontologies for capturing media semantics, present results through a diverse range of channels and summarise the findings of the project, including a Roadmap.
The research agenda is based on five premises:
1. Content-related metadata is an effective and scalable approach exemplified in this domain and applicable to future large scale, automated and interactive information systems;
2. The point of creation is the best time and place to collect (and compute) metadata;
3. The best way to represent this metadata is one that is amenable to knowledge processing and management, linked data strategies and logical inference;
4. Significant challenges require a cross-disciplinary approach, ranging from fundamental theory to applied research set in the context of a real problem; and
5. The UK is supremely placed with the world-leading skills and experience to be a world-beating authority in an area of intellectual and societal/commercial benefit.
This proposal deliberately does not address related problems of navigation through legacy content, nor of Rights Management, as these are already embedded in the research landscape. Instead, we concentrate on the production of future media items.
The issues raised and investigated by this proposal are pertinent not only to EPSRC, but also to ESRC, AHRC, JISC and TSB, and with particular relevance to the Digital Economy.
The applications of such ideas span all the different time-based media, including music, drama, documentary, film, texts and so on. In order to advance the field, this project will bring together acknowledged experts from across UK academia in a diverse range of disciplines, including Semantic Web experts, Signal Processing experts, Video experts, Performance experts and more. The project aims to form a network and a critical mass of expertise by a series of interventions that will also include industrial collaborators (assisted by the TSB Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network). Network activities include workshops and sandpits, as well as collaborative small scale research projects, each typically of 6 months duration with 2 or 3 participant universities.
The outcomes of the project include: Research and Impact Roadmaps; a well-connected community of researchers engineers, creatives, content producers and funders; commercial and full-fledged research proposals; research publications; and specific impact activities at world leading Broadcast and Media conventions.
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