AKTive Media running GIFT	Cross Media Annotation
Image Annotation	Graph Visualisations

AKTive Media : AKtive Media is an ontology based cross-media annotation (Images and Text) system. Our goal is to automate the process of annoation by suggesting knowledge to the user in an interactive way while the user is annotating and hence minimizing user effort. The system actively works in the background, interacting with web services and queries our central annotational store to look for context specific knowledge.

AKTive Media fact-file

What's the Problem?

With the receding hardware costs and ever increasing memory storage capability in computer systems. Large organisations’ intranets have reached the size of mini Webs, connecting thousands of computers and having reached size of dozens of millions of documents; it is expected that soon they will reach hundreds of millions of pages, i.e. a size comparable to the Internet at the end of the 90s. Collecting and aggregating multimedia knowledge is therefore of fundamental importance for every organization in order to gain competitiveness and to reduce costs. Evidence is often distributed in different media; it is possible that knowledge expressed in just one medium does not carry the full evidence looked for. In order to appreciate the real situation, connecting information stored in more than one medium is often required. It is clear that current knowledge management technologies and practises cannot cope with such situations, as they mainly provide simple mechanisms (e.g. keyword searching) for supporting knowledge workers manually pierce together the information from different sources.

Towards a Solution

AKTive Media is a user centric ontology based multimedia annotation system. The goal is to automate the process of annotation by means of knowledge sharing and reuse, thereby reducing user effort during the annotation process. The system actively queries web services and central annotational triple stores as a background service to look for context specific knowledge. The aim is to provide a seamless interface that guides the user through the process, reducing the complexity of the task. Languages technologies and a web service architecture are adopted to provide a context specific annotation mechanism that uses suggestions inferred from both the ontology and from the previously stored annotations to help the user: the ontology is pre filtered to present only the toplevel concepts (the most generic ones); when the users identify an instance of a top-level entity the system suggests the possible relevant sub-entities, e.g. when annotating a region of an image (Of a car engine) as a “part”, the system suggests all the possible parts present in the ontology for that engine and the user can select the right one. The same happens for relations, again inferred from the ontology and suggested to the user on the base of the concept selected: for example, when the part has been chosen, the user can select a “has_fault” relation and drag and drop the text in the document that describes the fault. When an instance has been identified it is possible to add freetext comments, to highlights findings or opinions, or to state some generic or contextual information about the instance, e.g. findings on why the failure happened. The produced knowledge is then used as a way to establish connections with and to navigate the information space: when the user annotates a part of an image as a “sand-damage” on a “car door ” the system uses those annotations to retrieve other related images and documents. New relationships can then be established with the found knowledge, e.g. the damage can be related to other previous cases, and through free-text comments the relationship may be made explicit (e.g. this type of failure happens constantly on this blade in hot conditions, and this is proved by document x).

AKTive Media is distributed under the Gnu General Public License, Academic Free License, Educational Community License and is available from Sourceforge.

Demonstration videos

Semantic representation

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project