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By Stephan Schneider - May 2001
Stephan Schneider reports on the 'Asset Management Integration of Cultural Heritage In The Interexchange of Archives' (AMICITIA) project (IST1999-20215). AMICITIA is a demonstrator project within the key action III (Multimedia content and tools), action line III.2.4: “Digital preservation of cultural heritage”. AMICITIA started on 1st of October, 2000 and will run for 2 years.
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Audiovisual archives are one of the most valuable cultural heritage resources of modern times. By providing living images, music and speech they preserve a picture of life in the past. Like other archives, such as library or art collections, they are in need of protection. Modern archiving not only serves future generations but also allows us to turn the unique wealth of European cultural heritage into value for the today's people.
The AMICITIA project [1] aims to build the base for a continued and viable digital preservation of, and access to, television and video content. It will achieve this through the construction of various vital components enabling a digital archiving system to serve all required roles in ingest, management, access and distribution of audiovisual material. Special focus has been placed on enabling remote, multilingual access to archival content stored in a distributed environment. The system is being designed to serve both the needs of professional users (regarding preservation, quality, access flexibility and usability) and the needs of public access (regarding simplicity of use, security and availability). As a demonstration project AMICITIA aims at getting its results into practical, marketable use as fast as possible.
Partners have been chosen to both develop innovative solutions and to test these solutions in real world environments. This has resulted in the consortium consisting of two groups:
i. A technology providing and researching group: Tecmath AG (DE, [2]) and Joanneum Research (AT, [3]).
ii. A strong user group including broadcasting companies and audiovisual archives such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (UK, [4]), the Austrian Broadcasting Cooperation (ORF) [5], the South-West Broadcasting Cooperation (SWR) (Germany, [6]). One new partner from the archives sector is currently being integrated in the consortium.
The work is distributed in a straightforward way: The tecmath AG acts as coordinator and provides the basic technology for a content management system. Joanneum Research, an Austrian Research Institution, develops technologies for distributed access (see the Distributed Access section).
The user partners analyse together the current workflow, finding weaknesses and developing a new idealised workflow using digital technologies. This work is led by the SWR. The user partners then define requirements for the new components to be developed in close collaboration with the technology partners. Some of the user partners have responsibility for several components: e.g. the ORF is responsible for the rights management system and for the storytelling interface (see the Access and Exchange Mechanisms section) and contributed to the multilingual (see the Distributed Access section). Extensive testing of the components integrated by the tecmath AG is also a main task of the user partners. The BBC will coordinate the evaluation process.
Most of the AMICITIA project partners were involved in the research project EUROMEDIA (ESPRIT 20636, [7]). Which ran from 1995 to 1998, this project's stated and achieved objective was to design and implement an asset management system for use in a broadcast environment to enable cooperative and efficient television production. The results of EUROMEDIA have been commercialized and are being exploited by TECMATH under the brand name media archive®. This product is currently installed at several European broadcasters and a market expansion into North America and Asia is foreseen for the future.
Two related IST projects have been started by one or more organizations involved in AMICITIA: PRIMAVERA [8] and Preservation Technology for European Broadcast Archives (PRESTO) [9]. These projects supplement each other and will work together closely to ensure that no redundant work is being done. The objectives of the these two concertating projects are:
The areas of collaboration are shown in the graph below:
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| Figure 1: Areas of collaboration |
Concertation is by no means limited to these projects only. There is for example an exchange of knowledge and experience with the Forum for Metadata Schema implementers (SCHEMA) [10] project, which concerns metadata. This collaboration is also based on personal contacts.
The AMICITIA project aims to develop and demonstrate new solutions in 4 working areas:
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| Figure 2: 4 working areas |
The challenges and their respective solutions will be described in detail below.
Distributed Access is now a problem
beyond the premises of a company or of an institution. Producing
content is very expensive and there is high pressure to reduce
cost. There are several ways to reduce production costs:
These ways require a distributed access to archives across company premises and across content owners. Many content producers, especially broadcasters, plan to reuse their content via online media. They intend to display and sell contents not only to partners within the same business but also to other professionals and to the general public.
Another challenge within Europe is multilingualism. Content Metadata is predominantly written in the native language of the content producer, which makes it difficult to retrieve for non-native users.
The AMICITIA projects responds to these challenges in two ways. The content management systems will be improved for distributed access across the Internet. For professional users there will be an interface which allows search and retrieval across the Internet, i.e. to get connected to external content management systems. This requires special protocols to ensure an overall system security on the one hand and to collaborate with the existing security mechanisms such as firewalls. To overcome the language barrier a thesaurus is under development, which aids the query in foreign language archives.
A Web interface developed separately will present selected contents to the general public.
The Distributed Access
issue described above raises new challenges to content management
systems: while copyrights can be cleared easily within one
company, distributing content requires much a higher level of
accurateness in rights issues. Professionals won’t purchase
content if the rights situation is not clear or if it is very
difficult to get the rights. Rights management is no easy matter
and it is usually done by specialised rights departments e.g. at
broadcasting companies.
Searching distributed archives requires special tools to store, select and sort the search results. Conventional search masks cannot fulfill these needs.
AMICITIA is developing an integrated property rights management system. The existing traffic lights solution (“no problem”, “restricted”, “rights unclear”) will be improved to cover the regional and factual extent of licenses and their timeframe. Existing rights management systems within the partners are analysed and will be interfaced whenever this possible.
To match the needs of searching distributed archives a so-called “story-telling” interface will be developed. The user can sort, select and pre-arrange search results with it. The new tool will support complex research work providing store and recall functionalities for long-term work and a facility to share results to empower collaborative work.
Once digitised content
was often thought to be immortal. This is a popular fallacy: Bits
of digitised content are aging rapidly. Due to its medium digital
content is exposed to degradation mainly because the physical
media e.g. disks or tapes are degrading. This is in contrast to
analogue recordings where the degradation may be visible or
audible digital recordings are degrading stealthy. Suddenly bits
flip from a “1” to “0” or vice versa or they
drop and are unreadable. If such a bit error hits vulnerable
areas of digital recordings such as file allocation tables a
whole bunch of assets may get lost. Restoration of damaged
digital media is very tedious, expensive and often impossible,
because assets, such as video frames, are coded and compressed
using complex algorithms. Most of the digital recording devices
therefore employ error correcting codes and algorithms to
overcome and correct single bit errors. Although they do work,
they work invisibly for the user of this media. The user has no
knowledge about the health of his/her media.
AMICITIA is developing a new strategy to protect digital contents. This strategy has 3 components:
The system alarms the operator before the number of defective bits exceeds the critical threshold where errors can no longer be corrected. To achieve this the system continuously monitors the bit error rate in the recording devices e.g. the tape drives in the tape libraries. Using a statistical approach the bit errors are analysed and compared with past results in order to estimate the threat of the digital content.
Once a real threat is detected the operator is warned and the threatened content is migrated to a new medium. If tapes are used the content of a damaged tape is copied to a new one. Restoring damaged media is not within the scope of the AMICITIA project but within the concertating PRESTO project.
The continuous maintenance tries to avoid bit errors through maintaining drives and media. This is done by periodicly cleaning the drives, monitoring their head adjustments and by caring the media e.g. by rewinding tape cartridges.
Most of the big
broadcasting companies have been in operation for several
decades. Their archives contain some 100.000 hours of analogue
video material. This materials is ageing and is waiting to be
digitised and annotated to protected it from further degradation.
Even in the digital age recordings are made on (digital) tapes
which have to be re-read and transferred into the digital domain
of an content management system.
It is clear that such an amount of work cannot be done manually; especially if it is done in parallel. If the digitising is done automatically the quality of the digitised content needs to be supervised continuously. No human eye can watch these endless streams of digitised video.
The project is developing a robot digitising station based on a tape library system capable of handling mixed media. The operator puts the bunch of tapes into the robot system, defines and starts the batch digitising process. The system will then do the rest while the quality of the digitised video is monitored continuously. A separate module analyses the video quality of the digitised material employing digital signal processing techniques. If the quality of the digitised material is not sufficient a fail-over process starts and this event is logged. The operator can supervise the batch process, get the loggings and can start further actions.
The AMICITIA project is now at the stage of completing the workflow analysis and requirements engineering phase. Coarse system designs have been drafted and the first graphical user interfaces have been discussed. The system architecture will now be refined to prepare the implementation of the components.
The first working prototype modules are expected for the end of this year. These modules will then be integrated into the content management system and extensively tested under real world conditions at our broadcasting partners.
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Stephan Schneider
Project Manager
Tecmath AG
Content Management Systems Division
Sauerwiesen 2
67 659 Kaiserslautern
GERMANY
stephan.schneider@cms.tecmath.com
<http://www.tecmath.de/>
Phone: +49 6301 606 200
Fax: +49 6301 606 209
Stephan Schneider is employed as Project Manager at the Research Department of Tecmath AG. He is responsible for the IST-Projects AMICITIA (IST1999-20215) and PRIMAVERA (IST1999-20408).
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For citation purposes:
Schneider, S. "AMICITIA – New Solutions for Today’s Challenges in Digital Audiovisual Archives", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/amicitia/>
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