OVERVIEW

The FilmEd project's original aim was to provide the tertiary education sector with broadband access to high quality and unique film and video content stored within Australian moving image archives to enhance curriculum based programs concerned with screen literacy, film and media studies, journalism and Australian culture and history.

A prototype called Vannotea has been developed which enables the collaborative indexing, annotation and discussion of audiovisual content over high bandwidth networks. It enables geographically distributed groups connected across broadband networks (GrangeNet) to perform real time collaborative sharing indexing, discussion and annotation of high quality digital film/video and images (and shortly 3D objects).

Vannotea's flexible design and metadata architecture allows it to be used within many other domains outside the original target domain:

Australian Institute of Sports

Vannotea has enormous potential as a tool to enable geographically distributed coaches to collaboratively analyse and improve athlete's performances. Discussions are underway with the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) about the software's deployment and application within their Performance Analysis Unit.

The Performance Analysis Unit, which aims to help coaches make effective use of IT in order to enhance athletes' development, is exploring the use of DSTC's technology to assist coaches in disparate locations.

DSTC has been using archival video from the AIS to test Vannotea's usability and applicability for collaborative performance analysis of elite Olympic swimmers. Vannotea has a user friendly search, browse and retrieval interfaces to the video database of swimmers performances during training and competition. For example, the database can be searched on swimmer's name, coach's name, event, lap number etc. It enables coaches to automatically segment the swimming videos into laps or selected clips and analyse and annotate the content using swimming terms and concepts, drawn from a predefined ontology.

CancerGrid

This project is a component of a Department of Education Science and Technology (DEST) Innovation Access Programme research grant (CG050091) - "Integrating Australia into Global eScience". Vannotea will be deployed at UK eScience Centres in Cambridge, Oxford and Southampton. In particular, it will be trialed within the CancerGrid project where it will support collaboration between distributed clinicians coordinating clinical trials for cancer diagnosis and treatment. In particular it will provide distributed clinical teams with shared group access to data associated with the clinical trials. [http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/projects/cancergrid/]

Museums - Indigenous Knowledge Management

In conjunction with DSTC's Indigenous Knowledge Management project, Vannotea is being extended to enable museum staff to share and exchange knowledge and digital representations of artifacts with the Indigenous communities who are the traditional owners. The aim is to deploy the software within museums to enable distributed groups to collaboratively discuss, describe and contextualize museum content from a variety of different perspectives.

In particular, Vannotea has been extended to enable users within videoconferencing environments to collaboratively attach descriptive, rights and tribal care metadata and annotations to digital images, video or 3D objects.

This sharing and exchange of knowledge will hopefully revitalize cultures eroded through colonization and globalization and repair and strengthen relationships between museums and indigenous communities. [http://metadata.net/ICM/]

==> Original project proposal (as .doc)