ECHO - European Chronicles Online

The aim of this project is to develop a long-term reusable software infrastructure providing Web-based access to a European historical film collection, and to set up and run an ECHO (European Chronicles Online) digital library service.

The European Chronicles On-line (ECHO) project is a joint effort of (i) European content partners, (ii) U.S. and European academic and government research partners and (iii) industrial development partners headquartered on both continents. The ECHO participating institutions have unique collections of documentary films dating from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960's. These collections are of extraordinary value since they document different aspects (social, cultural, political, economic) of life in four European countries (Italy, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland) during this period of time. The aim of the project is to develop a long-term reusable software infrastructure providing Web-based access to its film collection, and to set up and run an ECHO digital library service. The project will integrate state-of-the-art existing technologies, such as the Informedia technology (developed by Carnegie Mellon University) and the Media-Archive® technology (developed by Germany's Tecmath), and will extend them to support new advanced services: semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition; integration of non-English speech recognizers for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval; cross-language retrieval capabilities; automatic film summary creation; privacy and billing systems.

The Media Archive® is a content management system that has been developed by Tecmath in close cooperation with major European broadcasters. It ensures an open and customizable structure that reflects the actual workflow of a professional broadcasting industry user. It supports the entire workflow chain of acquisition, documentation, archiving, retrieval, rough editing and provision.

The project builds on these core technologies in order to be able to handle digital film data and integrate them so as to build a basic open infrastructure supporting digital film services. Distinct and innovative features of the ECHO project which contribute to the advancement of the state of the art in the digital film library area are the following: (i) an open architecture which supports interoperability of audiovisual archive services, (ii) a new film metadata format, (iii) full-content and knowledge-based retrieval, (iv) monolingual query and retrieval for each collection language, (v) multilingual query and cross-language retrieval capabilities for topics and story content, (vi) integration of speech recognition engine(s) for each collection language for content-based indexing, (vii) a collection mechanism, (viii) a film summarization abstracting tool, and (ix) an authentication and accounting mechanism.

Our group is responsible for the definition of the global system architecture and is involved in the definition of the metadata model, and development and evaluation of the system prototypes.

From the application point of view, the ECHO project will contribute to the development of a new digital film library technology that will allow independent, self-motivated access to information for learning, exploration, entertainment, and research. This will bring about a revolutionary improvement in the way education, entertainment, and training are delivered and received.

Conferences and Presentations

"Interpreting Human Activity with Integrated Video Understanding and Sensor Analysis".
Wactlar, H. Keynote Speaker. Media Mill Annual Conference, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 30, 2003.

"Image Feature Extraction". Ng, T.D. European Chronicles Online, Hilversium, The Netherlands, September 27, 2002.

"Face Detection and Matching". Ng, T.D. European Chronicles Online, Hilversium, The Netherlands, September 27, 2002.

"Extracting and Visualizing Knowledge from Film and Video Archives". Wactlar, H. Keynote speaker. I-KNOW '02 International Conference on Knowledge Management, Graz, Austria, July 11-12, 2002.

"Digital Video Libraries". Wactlar, H. Lecture. DELOS International Summer School of Digital Library Technologies (ISDL'01), Pisa, Italy, July 9-13, 2001.

Related Links

First EU-DL All Projects Concertation Meeting, February 7-8, 2002, Luxembourg.

First meeting in the series of EU/NSF Digital Libraries All Projects Meeting, March 25-26, 2002, Rome, Italy.

National Research Council - Italy, Institito di Elaborazione della Informazione

ECHO - European Chronicles On-Line, Savino, P. & Thomas C. Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000.