Abstract
(Englisch)
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ECHO (European Chronicles On-line) is a project promoted by the European Commission (No. 11994) and part of the Information Technology (IST) Programme. The main objectives of the project are to develop a long term reusable software infrastructure to support digital film archives, to provide Web-based access to collections of historical documentary films of great international value and to increase the productivity and cost effectiveness of producing digital film archives. The project will develop and demonstrate an open architecture approach to distributed digital film archive services. The open architecture will support service extensibility and interoperability. The distinct features of the ECHO system will be: semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition from digital film Information, non-English speech recognizers or OCR collection tools (Italian, French, Dutch, German) for the purpose of indexing, searching, and retrieval, cross-language retrieval capabilities, intelligent access to digital films, automatic film summary Creation, collection mechanisms, privacy and billing mechanisms.
The ECHO consortium is a well assorted one, in terms of skills, experiences and qualifications necessary to achieve the goals of the project. The ECHO partners can be divided into three categories: (i) content providers (documentary film collections holders), (ii) industrial partners and (iii) academic partners. Eurospider Information Technology (EIT) can be counted among the industrial partners, and will mainly be responsible for the development and integration of the software components needed to the management of the digital archive of Memoriav, a Swiss content provider in the ECHO consortium. Memoriav is an association for the preservation of the audiovisual heritage of Switzerland and owns large and precious audio visual collections which document the different aspects of the life in their own countries during this century, starting from the twenties and continuing up to the sixties.
EIT specific contributions to the ECHO Project are:
- Technical service providing for Memoriav content (Filmwochenschau 1940-1960 and Tagesschau 1957-1960) and usability tests.
- High-performance retrieval facilities to the ECHO system, as well as cross-lingual retrieval functionality in 4 languages (English, French, German and Italian).
- Integrating the existing Memoriav (Dublin Core) database into ECHO meta-database.
- Integrated retrieval solution for scanned document (OCR).
- Developing a tool for semi-manual extraction of additional metadata from scanned documents.
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