Erich Gams

Trailist---focusing on document activity for assisting navigation

Trails are a long established concept of assisting users in searching and navigating hypertexts. However, existing trail-based systems are focusing on browsers only and therefore do not fully exploit the notion of trails. We propose trail-based systems to be open to any application and to any activity. For instance, printing a document from a word processor, posting a message in a newsgroup, or forwarding an attachment to a friend — using ones favorite e-mail client — may well be part of a trail. “Trailist” is a framework supporting the development of these trail-based systems. Its name indicates that, similar to the way “Tour-ists” travel on tours, “Trail-ists” make their ways through vast information spaces.

Smart content factory: assisting search for digital objects by generic linking concepts to multimedia content

Search, retrieval and navigation in audiovisual repositories is a task common to all media asset management systems: Users are supported by a wide range of features which are traditionally based on full text search and metadata queries. In this paper we describe an approach to superimpose a semantic indexing infrastructure over the media assets and the metadata associated with them. The infrastructure is based on formal knowledge models and facilitates the use of further navigation dimensions: By identifying semantic concepts we are able to create a dynamic navigation structure which is based on the underlying knowledge model and the conceptual relations defined therein.

Recommending Internet-Domains Using Trails and Neural Networks

This paper discusses the use of artificial neural networks, trained with patterns extracted from trail data, as recommender systems. Feed-forward Multilayer-Perceptrons trained with the Backpropagation Algorithm were used to assign a rating to pairs of domains, based on the number of people that had traversed between them. The artificial neural network constructed in this project was capable of learning the training set to a great extent, and showed good generalizational capacities.

Semantische Content Management Systeme

Content Management Systeme (CMS) sind in vielen Organisationen bereits seit langerer Zeit fester Bestandteil zur Verwaltung und kollaborativen Bearbeitung von Text- und Multimedia-Inhalten. Im Zuge der rasch ansteigenden Fulle an Informationen und somit auch Wissen wird die Uberschaubarkeit der Datenbestande jedoch massiv eingeschrankt. Diese und zusatzliche Anforderungen, wie automatisch Datenquellen aus dem World Wide Web (WWW) zu extrahieren, lassen traditionelle CMS immer mehr an ihre Grenzen stosen. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die neuen Herausforderungen an traditionelle CMS und bietet Losungsvorschlage, wie CMS kombiniert mit semantischen Technologien diesen Herausforderungen begegnen konnen. Die Autoren stellen eine generische Systemarchitektur fur Content Management Systeme vor, die einerseits Inhalte fur das Semantic Web generieren, andererseits Content aus dem Web 2.0 syndizieren konnen und bei der Aufbereitung des Content den User mittels semantischer Technologien wie Reasoning oder Informationsextraktion unterstutzen. Dabei wird auf Erfahrungen bei der prototypischen Implementierung von semantischer Technologie in ein bestehendes CMS System zuruckgegriffen.

The Role of MPEG-7 in semantic Annotation and the Cross-Media Publishing Process

During the development of a knowledge-based audio-visual information system the authors of this article defined a conceptual system architecture based on MPEG-7 as the general description scheme for the media assets in the middleware. This concept was not only used to achieve a high abstraction and independence of the underlying media asset management system, it was also and primarily used as the basis of a semantic indexing process. Based on lightweight ontologies the descriptions of the media assets were associated with semantic concepts. Semantically annotated MPEG-7 assets were then propagated to the presentation layer, thus allowing the implementation of a variety of publication scenarios, including cross-media scenarios for the creation of concise video summaries