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Although the Metadata Editor is an important part of any digital library, it becomes fundamental in the presence of audiovisual content. This is because the metadata produced by automated support tools (such as speech recognizers and shot detection procedures) is error-prone and often needs correction. In addition, scenes are manually annotated. This paper describes Regia, a prototype application for manually editing metadata for audiovisual documents developed in the ECHO project. Regia allows the user to manually edit textual metadata and to hierarchically organize the segmentation of the audiovisual content. An important feature of this metadata editor is that it is not hard-wired with a particular metadata attributes set. To achieve this feature the XML schema of the metadata model is used by the editor as a configuration file.

International audience; This demonstration describes the results of the first year of the EuDML project, an initiative building a new multilingual service for searching and browsing the content of existing European portals of mathematical content. We demonstrate the first versions and proofs of concept of the EuDML portal, its contents' aggregator, and a toolset for added value.

This chapter deals with the problem of processing and analyzing digital images of ancient or degraded documents to increase the possibilities of inferring their structures. Classification and recognition are needed to infer structure but, when dealing with degraded documents, they are particularly difficult to apply directly to unprocessed images. This is why an intermediate step is needed that extracts automatically the "perceptual components" of the documents from their appearance. By "appearance" of a document, we mean the "raw" data set, containing the "sensorial components" of the object under study. Ancient documents of historical importance pose specific problems that are now being solved with the help of information technology. As much information as possible should be drawn from the physical documents and should be structured so as to permit specialized searches to be performed in large databases. The tools we use to treat unstructured, low-level information are both mathematical and descriptive. Under a mathematical point of view, we model our appearance as a function of all the perceptual components, or patterns we want to identify. Once the model has been established, its parameters can be learned from the data available and from reasonable assumptions on both the model itself and the patterns. Our descriptive tools form a specialized metadata schema that can help both the storage and the indexing of all the digital objects produced to represent the original document, and provides a complete description of all the processing performed. Suitable links fully interconnect the various descriptions in order to relate the different representations of the physical object and to trace the history of all the processing performed. Inferring structure is much easier by analyzing the patterns and their mutual relationships than by analyzing the appearance.

Wide access to large information collections is of great importance in many aspects of everyday life. However, limitations in information and communication technologies have, so far, prevented the average person from taking much advantage of existing resources. Digital Libraries tend to fill the gap between users and systems by providing services for the indexing, archival, management and retrieval of documents. Among other types of information, Audio/Video can be considered today as a primarily mean of communication, due to its richness in informative content and to its appeal. This implies that the development of Digital Libraries supporting the management of Audio/Video documents is of primarily importance to enable the access to the general public as well as to professional users of a significant asset of today life. This chapter presents the approach adopted in the ECHO (European CHronicles On line) system to provide an effective support for indexing, retrieval and management of historical documentary films. In order to achieve an effective and inexpensive indexing and a powerful support to content-based retrieval of Audio/Video material, a combination of automatic and manual indexing has been adopted.

Video can be considered today as a primarily mean of communication, due to its richness in informative content and to its appeal. Indeed, the combination of audio and video is an extremely important communication channel: it is considered that approximately 50% of what is seen and heard simultaneously is retained. Due to all these considerations, audio/video is particularly important in many different application sectors, such as TV broadcasting, professional applications (e.g. medicine, journalism, advertising, education, etc.), movie production, historical video archives. Furthermore, most of the video material produced is extremely difficult to access, due to several limitations: video documents are extremely large in size, so that archiving and transmission are expensive; video document’s content, even if extremely rich, is difficult to extract in order to support an effective content-based retrieval.