Odysseus

MediAssist is a three year research project at DCU. The objective of this project is to provide solutions to problems of organizing and accessing very large archives of personal image content now being collected by user of digital cameras and camcorders both as separate products and within multifunction devices such as mobile phones. At the conclusion of the MediAssist project, we will have researched, developed and field-tested a new generation of consumer-oriented personal photograph navigation tools.

By "very large" archives of personal image content we mean that between personally collected photographs and collections shared with family, friends, colleagues and web communities, many individuals have direct access to between 10,000 and potentially millions of images. However, there is a big difference between access to such a collection and effective, fast and accurate retrieval for any particular purpose.

One of the enabling technologies used by MediAssist for linking and retrieving photo content is the GPS location labelling of images at the time of capture. GPS data enables us to identify photographs taken in close proximity potentially by different photographers on different occastions, and when combined with gazetteers this data enables us to verbally label the place at which the photograph was taken.

Within the MediAssist project we have already developed a number of prototype systems for retrieving browsing photographs from personal collections. These are largely based on extensions to the standard photo-album metaphor adopted by current commercial photo-management applications. The focus of this project will be implement a way of searching and browsing photograph collections using latest developments in web technology. This project would involve taking photographs from the location labelled MediAssist research collection of over 10,000 images and adding them as a layer to the Google Earth application. In this application thumbnails of the photos or groups of photos at a given location would pop up as the users "flys" over that location using the application. Selecting a photograph could reveal characteristics such as a detailed metadata (date, time, etc.) when it was taken. Photographs could be linked temporally to show the sequence in which they were taken, or to show only those taken, possibly by multiple photographers within a given time frame. Other possibilities for grouping and visualization of photographs will be limited only by our imagination as the prototype system is developed.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

Technologies for the management of digital assets are developing very rapidly. In order ensure that the MediAssist project to remains relevant we must identify and explore new technologies, such as Google Earth, for information management. A project to build a prototype system of this type would be very timely enabling us to gain insights into the exploitation of this new technology in information management applications.

Supervisors:

Dr Gareth J. F. Jones (AIC, DCU)

Keywords:

Management of personal photographs; User Interfaces; Google Earth; Browsing Image Collections

Links:

http://earth.google.com/