Instructions for preparing proposal Part b for Integrated Projects in the ist priority

Resources to be committed

ConnectME work will be done with a total of ... person months over ... months, representing almost ... persons' effort per month. The total funding requested is ...

Figure 11: Effort breakdown
Figure 11 shows the breakdown of partner effort (by participant number). Figure 12 shows the breakdown by budget.

Figure 12: Budget breakdown

It can be seen that both effort and budget is fairly distributed, ...

Figure 13: Breakdown by type

Together with the resources requested in the ConnectME budget, every partner in the consortium is able to bring own resources to the carrying out of the project workplan without charge to the project. This is also an important aspect of being sure of a successful project operation, where every partner is in a position to provide further necessary resources from its own side.
Major costs that will not be charged to the project by consortium members, but committed to be provided at own cost where necessary for the fulfilment of the ConnectME workplan include:

• 
  Personnel Costs: own personnel resources contributed include mainly administration work time devoted to handling project financial and management issues
  
• 
  Research and administrative services: secretary, legal support, human resources, library, computing services and others
  
• 
  Infrastructure: own Infrastructure resources contributed such as access to local computer network, Internet access, software and hardware as required.
  

Section 3. Impact

One central result of ConnectME will be a framework that will enable rich annotation of audiovisual material with associations to concepts, and on the basis of these annotations related Web content can be associated dynamically with objects in the video stream. An end user receives a video in which objects can be accessed and multimedia presentations received to communicate information about those objects. This framework can form the basis for added value services to users, which generate new value in video content by making it interactive and informative. Here we focus on two aspects of the expected impact of ConnectME: in society, and in business.

3.1 Social and business impact

The Lisbon declaration stated that the EU should become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world” (2000). Competitiveness and dynamism is based on access to information which is available at our fingertips, and which is intuitive and relevant. This is also the central research goal of ConnectME. Our focus on industrial and social uptake aims to ensure that we not only achieve our research aims but that this result has a real and viable impact in both industry (strengthening European competitiveness) and society (advancing the information society).

The impact of this is to change our understanding of IP-based audiovisual content and particularly IP-based Television. Television has already established itself as a passive medium, and efforts to promote Interactive Television must fight against this ingrained expectation. The Web, on the other hand, has always been interactive and the convergence of the Web with TV must not turn the Web experience into a passive experience like television viewing.

A new paradigm of IPTV merges the popularity of television as a means of communication with the benefits of the Web as an immense content source. We expect this can impact in different ways: (1) in society, European citizens as part of the information society have eased access to relevant information about objects addressed in video, independent of language or national barriers; (2) in business, professionals can use video more effectively as an information source (the various business and financial TV channels and programmes show already how video is used) because the access to related information about a topic in the program can be more readily available for perusal, being presented in an intuitive and meaningful way; (3) in industry, the growing sectors of TV & video production, TV broadcasting and software firms supporting the development and consumption of broadcast media, challenged by the growth in Web video which is already clearly seen as a competitor of traditional broadcasters, need new services to gain a competitive edge and increase market share. The ConnectME framework can offer this new added value to bring European industry ahead competitively in the increasingly global market.

To achieve this impact, the relevant communities must be prepared, standards sought to ensure industry uptake and early adopters found to demonstrate the value of ConnectME services. The consortium has prepared itself well for all these challenges, as outlined beforehand and described in detail in this document.

3.2 Social: strengthening digital society

Education and access to information are two important pillars of the European digital society of the future. Here, Web based audiovisual material and TV broadcaster archives represent a definitive and significant source for both education and information.

Digitization of analogue audiovisual material will ensure future access. Over the past years, technologies for large-scale migration have matured. The same is also true for thinking about migration projects in terms of their efficiency and the workflow models they could follow. Although the process is far from complete, approximately ten million hours of European audiovisual material has already been digitized [7]. Recently, the audiovisual production process shifted from analogue to digital. This so-called ‘born digital’ content is directly ingested in asset management systems and will also be kept for posterity as electronic files. Due to digitization and digital production, audiovisual content collections are transforming from archives of analogue material into very large stores of digital data.

For the humanities, digital cultural heritage sources are a fundamental dataset. In the Netherlands, Academia (www.academia.nl), developed by Sound and Vision, offers online access to thousands of hours of streaming video for higher education purposes. Similar services are being created across Europe. As television studies have grown and the study of television history in particular, so has the need for original sources. While historians have long been reluctant to use media for research of the 20th century past, they increasingly use audiovisual sources to fill in gaps, to shed new light on where traditional sources only reveal part of the story [6]. The need for digitized sources along with expertise, standards, tools and services to support use and reuse of content has been acknowledged, but this need is still far from being fully met.

Digitization is also a driver to establish new services. Distribution over networks, interoperability with other collections and flexible integration in other environments are just a few of many properties in this new era of enormous potential for audiovisual archives. Therefore, large-scale digitization efforts do not only ensure long-term access, but also have the potential to reveal the social and economic value of the collections. ConnectME will allow this material to be exploited in a new way, namely by

1. adding a more fine-grained, concept specific, level to access the collections and

2. combining materials of different types, sources and origins to discover and demonstrate new knowledge about the artifacts.