Ferran Perdrix

Neptuno: Semantic Web Technologies for a Digital Newspaper Archive

Newspaper archives are a fundamental working tool for editorial teams. Their exploitation in digital format through the web, and the provision of technology to make this possible, are also important businesses today. The volume of archive contents, and the complexity of human teams that create and maintain them, give rise to diverse management difficulties. We propose the introduction of the emergent semantic-based technologies to improve the processes of creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the digital archive of a newspaper. We describe a platform based on these technologies, that consists of a) a knowledge base associated to the newspaper archive, based on an ontology for the description of journalistic information, b) a semantic search module, and c) a module for content browsing and visualisation based on ontologies.

Building a Usable and Accessible Semantic Web Interaction Platform

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is due to the novelty of these technologies, but this also motivates the exploration of alternative interaction paradigms, different from the “traditional” Web or Desktop applications ones. Our proposal is realized in the Rhizomer platform, which explores the possibilities of the object–action interaction paradigm at the Web scale. This paradigm is well suited for heterogeneous resource spaces such as those common in the Semantic Web. Resources, described by metadata, correspond to the objects in the paradigm. Semantic web services, which are dynamically associated to these objects, correspond to the actions. The platform is being put into practice in the context of a research project in order to build an open application for media distribution based on Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, its usability and accessibility have been evaluated in this real setting and compared to similar systems.

The Rhizomer Semantic Content Management System

The Rhizomer platform is a Content Management System (CMS) based on a Resource Oriented Approach (RESTful) and Semantic Web technologies. It achieves a great level of flexibility and provides sophisticated content management services. All content is described using semantic metadata semi-automatically extracted from multimedia content, which enriches the browsing experience and enables semantic queries. A usable user interface is built on top of the CMS in order to facilitate the interaction with content and enhance it with the information provided by the associated semantic metadata. As an application scenario of the platform, its use in a media company where audio content is managed and its speech transcript semantically annotated is described.

Ontology-Based Retrieval of Human Speech

As part of the general growth and diversification of media in different modalities, the presence of information in the form of human speech in the world-wide body of digital content is becoming increasingly significant, in terms of both volume and value. We present a semantic- based search model for human speech corpora, stressing the search for meanings rather than words. Our framework embraces the complete recognition/retrieval cycle, from word spotting to semantic annotation, query processing, and search result presentation.

The semantic web as a newspaper media convergence facilitator

Newspapers are evolving and this causes great changes in how newspapers reach their consumers, but also in how newspapers work internally. Advanced computerised support is needed in order to cope with the new needs, which require that machines are aware of a greater part of the underlying semantics. Ontologies and Semantic Web technologies are clear candidates for web-wide semantics. However, newspapers have made great investments in their current news management systems and their wish is to undertake a smooth transition. Our proposal is to build an ontological framework based on existing journalism and multimedia standards. These standards are based on XML technologies. Therefore, we have developed a generic XML Schema to OWL mapping, complemented with an XML to RDF one. Together, they allow reusing existing metadata that, once in a semantic space, facilitates data integration, news management and retrieval. The resulting ontological framework is being applied in the Diari Segre Media Group, which produces press, radio and television content.

Newspaper Archives on the Semantic Web

The introduction of information technologies in the news industry has marked a new evolutionary cycle in the journalistic activity. The creation of new infrastructures, protocols and exchange standards for the automatic or on-demand distribution and/or sale of information packages through dif-ferent channels and transmission formats has deeply transformed the way in which news industry players communicate with each other. One inter-esting consequence of this technological transformation has been the emergence, in very few years, of a whole new market of online services for archive news redistribution, syndication, aggregation, and brokering. Newspaper archives are a highly valuable information asset for the widest range of information consumer profiles: students, researchers, historians, business professionals, the general public, and not the least, news writers themselves. Providing technology for news archive construction, manage-ment, access, publication, and billing, is an important business nowadays. The information collected from everyday news is huge in volume, very loosely organized, and grows without a global a-priori structure. This ever-growing corpus of archived news results from the coordinated but to much extent autonomous work of a team of reporters, whose primary goal is not to build an archive, but to serve the best possible information product for

Semantic Web Interfaces for Newspaper Multimedia Content Management

The S5T project explores the possibilities of a semantic content management system in the context of a mass media group (radio, TV, newspaper and internet). The system is based on Semantic Web technologies and attempts to build up a media repository that makes the media house more productive. To carry out such a challenge, the project features a user interface that takes profit from all the modelling and annotation effort, which is carried out during ontology construction and semantic annotation of audio transcriptions. In particular, three interfaces have been developed whose goal is to facilitate the main interaction modes, search and browsing. For the former, a query-by-example tool has been created. For the latter, there are two specialised interfaces, which allow browsing media contents and the semantic annotations for transcriptions. These interfaces make it possible to take profit from the underlying ontologies during user interaction.

Semantic data integration in a newspaper content management system

A newspaper content management system has to deal with a very heterogeneous information space as the experience in the Diari Segre newspaper has shown us The greatest problem is to harmonise the different ways the involved users (journalist, archivists...) structure the newspaper information space, i.e news, topics, headlines, etc Our approach is based on ontology and differentiated universes of discourse (UoD) Users interact with the system and, from this interaction, integration rules are derived These rules are based on Description Logic ontological relations for subsumption and equivalence They relate the different UoD and produce a shared conceptualisation of the newspaper information domain.