Multi-terminal navigation platform for multimedia news content – Periplus

The area of accessible content from public networks (eg Internet) or private is in a phase of profound transformation, due to the digitization of most publications, the diversification of media and terminals. The proliferation of information and digital knowledge accessible through search engines, video on demand, exchange platforms and annotations or social networking face today major challenges economically and socially. Among these major challenges, let us focus on how to interface with the mass of digital documents. The amount of data, the increase in photographs / videos and the emergence of new terminals (including mobile) has necessitated the development of new access systems to large databases of documents of virtual worlds, particularly in terms of navigation and information synthesis. This is especially a problem for the flow of information that feeds daily newspaper websites, television, radio, or blogs.

In this context, Periplus is an industrial research project which meets in the specific environment of participatory journalism on the Internet, the challenge of navigating the multimedia corpus that is accessible in digital databases from terminals. This project proposes to develop a synergy between research in ICST (CEA LIST, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs), design (Pompidou Center-IRI), usage (CNRS Lutin) and industrial (Diotasoft, Alcatel-Lucent) to propose several demonstrators with innovative methods of research, mapping, navigation and interaction supported by new technologies for processing multimedia data. We will mainly show the relevance and feasibility of using individual or collective dynamic tools of classification, generation of multimedia summaries, gestural interaction and navigation within a corpus of news, developed both in functional and economic angles.
The navigation platform will be tested by analysis of usage in the particular context of a digital newspaper of general information (Mediapart).

The expected progresses of the project are based on:
- An analysis of research practice of multimedia material from various terminals, focusing on new trends induced by analytical tools and treatment implemented in the project.
- The creation by designers of innovative navigation interfaces including the presentation of different information and functionality provided by technology and new modes of interaction (particularly tactile).
- The automatic creation of dynamic classes and summaries in navigable terminals and requests oriented and enhancing the text, image or video from multimedia documents.
- The modification of software tools and formats required for submission interfaces developed on several terminals (mobile, computer).