Personal Navigation in the World of News Nikos Sarris, Paulo Villegas, Martin Pinkerneil, Jochen Spangenberg, JérômePicault  include journalists, photographers, reporters or any other Abstract— This is a brief description of MESH - Multimedia employee in the media sector. semantic syndication for enhanced news services Business user: A professional associated to the world of (http://www.mesh-ip.eu), an EC co-funded project that started in media, interested in building a business using the MESH March 2006 to create a framework for intelligent creation and delivery of semantically-enhanced multimedia news. platform. This business will relate to models of electronic news services as a focused news agency or a thematic portal Index Terms— MESH, multimedia, syndication, knowledge, which will make use of MESH technologies to provide personalisation intelligent content services. I. INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE III. MESH NEWS IN 2010 - A SCENARIO I N our days we are confronted with vast amounts of information commonly referred to as “news”. News about all aspects of our everyday lives are nowadays accessible in MESH has tried to describe the expected future usage and consumption of news with some storyline scenarios. One of these scenarios - which has been visualised in a Flash all corners of the world. But how easy is it for anyone to application (to view it go to http://www.mesh-ip.eu) - portrays navigate in this flood of information, and what opportunities the life of Ilias Bonn, a freelance business and economics are there to get an objective view of controversial events, at journalist and consultant travelling back and forth between national or international level? Thessaloniki in Greece and Cologne in Germany. Was the latest war an invasion or a liberation? Were the latest elections a grand victory or the result of an unfair election system? Our era of knowledge should provide for methods of understanding the meaning of ‘news’. Contemporary methods should organise news in a semantic way that allows the reader to have a complete overview of all similar and conflicting views. They should furthermore provide for the filtering of information according to personal preferences and interests. II. MESH TARGET USERS Within the MESH vision three categories of potential users have been identified: Fig. 1. Ilias Bonn scenario as a flash animation Personal user: An individual everyday news consumer At the European CEDEFOP Institute (European Institute who may belong to any profession or business and wishes to for the Advancement of Professional Skills) Ilias Bonn is use the MESH platform to have access to everyday breaking working as a reviewer and external advisor. However, in the or archived news in an easy and effective way. past the physical distance has often kept him from working for Professional user: A professional who works in the area of CEDEFOP. This has all changed, thanks to advancements in media and would like to use the MESH platform to make technology, and thanks to MESH! It is vital for Ilias Bonn's his/her work easier and more effective. This category may professional life to have access to news content in various formats coming from various sources, anywhere and at any Manuscript received September 15, 2006. time, using both stationary and portable end devices. MESH is The research leading to this document has received funding from the to provide for most of the needs of Ilias Bonn as his interests European Community's Sixth Framework Programme. However, it reflects have been formed by tracking his usage of content and only the authors' views, and the European Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. services, and the system assumes and makes suggestions as to Nikos Sarris is with ATC SA, Athens, Greece (e-mail: n.sarris@atc.gr) how Ilias can be kept up to date with the material that is useful Paulo Villegas is with Telefonica I+D, Valladolid, Spain (e-mail: to him. paulo@tid.es) Martin Pinkerneil and Jochen Spangenberg are with Deutsche Welle, Time spent in planes is ideally suited to view video content, Germany (e-mail: {martin.pinkerneil}{ jochen.spangenberg}@dw-world.de) as this is much easier done than reading or typing. Ever since Jérôme Picault is with MOTOROLA SAS, Paris, France (e-mail: MESH has become fully in line (synchronised) with Ilias jerome.picault@motorola.com) Bonn's profile, even short journeys are ideal for effective personally provided preferences, but also through video searches as MESH automatically refines search results automatic understanding of their needs and interests by to clips which could be interesting to Ilias for watching or monitoring their requests and habits. reusing in his articles. Requesting licences for the material is i news items will then have to be matched to the readers’ dealt with automatically by the MESH platform. New licence interests and requests by reasoning what news would be requests only occur when new sources are accessed and used, preferred by which reader and in which way. or when content is accessed on a basis different to usage i news have to be delivered in an effective way. models that are in operation already between Ilias and the Personalised multimedia summaries can be a basic means various content suppliers he uses. The "content auctions" of navigation into the full set of information, while items which Ilias conducts for international re-use of his referring to the same subject will have to be shown in copyrighted material generate further income for him. parallel to make critical reviews possible. Through semantic analysis MESH understands the content of i the source of information will also have to be Ilias' submitted material and suggests purchasing to specific understood and profiled if the reader is to be assisted in MESH users according to their preferences as described in forming an objective view of actual events. Structured their profiles. information will have to be provided about the source Every three hours MESH provides Ilias with a personalised helping the reader to understand whether the news summary of Greek news including textual articles, videos and provided could be biased and, if this is likely to be the images from several sources. Pictures and video material from case, towards which side. Credibility will also have to be the early days of the Internet and streaming media are measured in such a way. available free of charge from German providers, whereas i in our times, mobility is a significant aspect to be taken several billing models are available for high quality video, into account. With mobile devices being used more and depending on its popularity. The MESH system / architecture more both for the production and consumption of news, "knows" what it is doing as the score of its users regarding special technologies need to be advanced into a individual content items are put into correlation with each framework that allows effective inclusion of mobile other, providing content suppliers with valuable information "prosumers". about quality and quantity of the content that is being offered. Every time new and related material is added, this is V. MESH TECHNOLOGY referenced, linked and associated with existing content. This In order to fulfil the objectives mentioned, a number of process can be based on available metadata or on the technologies are being developed and integrated into the automatic extraction of meaning, done by individual MESH MESH system: tools and components. Apart from using various automatic i Multimodal analysis, reasoning and annotation: annotation mechanisms, Ilias is still also using a manual semantic concepts within the context of application annotation tool for tagging his work according to his personal domains will be extracted based on knowledge-assisted judgement or for checking on the automatic annotation multimodal analysis and annotation using a multimedia provided by MESH. The video search function also provides ontology infrastructure. quick and quite reliable results as both real-time and off-line i Summarisation: advances in both semantic analysis are used for the recognition of content based on the summarisation (using the generated knowledge) and real- understanding of images, speech and text. Even older material time summarisation will be pursued. is always taken into consideration with every query, either because the personal agent has "learned" from past i Personalisation: innovative methods for achieving experiences or because other MESH users have fine-tuned and granular personalisation suitable for use in resource- further improved existing data. constrained environments will be developed. MESH has become a vital part in the life of Ilias Bonn. He i Multimedia content adaptation will cover the selection can no longer imagine life without MESH! of optimal adaptation parameters and different adaptation modalities (transcoding, transmoding, scalable content). IV. MESH PROBLEM STATEMENT i Reasoning for syndication and access will handle semantic comparison and the combination of meaning What advances are still needed to push the previous vision extracted from various multimedia sources. from fiction to reality? i news have to be understood by fully or semi-automatic VI. CONCLUSION mechanisms. This means that a news item (in any multimedia form; text, image or video) has to be analysed The MESH project was initiated with the vision to integrate and categorised (i.e. annotated) according to its contents. semantic technologies into a setting that will bring the world i news consumers also have to be understood. This of news closer to knowledge-enabled services. Twelve involves the profiling of individuals in a structured different organisations from seven EU countries with manner and constantly updating these profiles through expertise in all these diverse fields have joined forces to make personal navigation in the world of news a reality.