The BBC made use of semantic video annotation in its coverage of the 2012 Olympics

It’s fair to say that an good idea has finally “arrived” when it has left the realm of the theoretical and has become the foundation of a lot of popular tools, services, and applications.

That is surely the case with Semantic Video.

Gone are the days when internet video could best be described as a meaningless blob of content invisible to search and impossible to annotate and reuse in meaningful ways.

The past year has seen an explosion of practical (and popular) services and applications that are based upon the extraction of meaningful metadata– and often linked data– from video content.

For those of us lucky enough to view it, the BBC wowed us last July with its Olympic Coverage, broadcasting live every event of the Olympics on 24 HD streams, all accessible over the internet, with live, dynamic data and statistics on athletes.  To pull off this feat, the BBC used a custom-designed Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform which included fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to help author, curate and publish  ontology and instance data.

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Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Media has been quoted saying, “Video, in its native form, is a blob of content… and it’s hard to extract data from it.” Thankfully, semantic technologies are starting to take video “beyond the blob,” and that is precisely what panelists at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will discuss.

The panel discussion Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age is set to begin at 2:25 on Monday, June 3 at SemTechBiz and will feature a panel of semantic web professionals with a broad range of experience regarding semantic video. The panel will be moderated by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead & Founder of GoodSpeaks.org, an organization aimed at creating a nonprofit media and data distribution network that increases public awareness and support of the work done by nonprofit and other charitable organizations.  Read more

Esther Schindler of IT World recently discussed a number of new technologies that have a definite cool factor in addition to plenty of real world applications. She focuses on facial recognition technology: “The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used clever geek bait to attract me to its booth: video clips from The Big Bang Theory. Formally, the project ‘focuses on the exploration of new methods in computer vision to enable detection and analysis of faces and people in both images and video’… For instance, touching the screen can bring up the actor’s record on imdb.com (destroying any argument with your spouse that begins, ‘Really, that’s the same actor who was in an episode of Firefly!’), or enabling better video search results (such as, ‘Show me all the scenes with both Sheldon and Penny’).” Read more

Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch reports that semantic video technology company Affine has a new name: “Affine Systems first came to market several years ago with a product that helped advertisers deliver video ads with some pretty impressive brand safety features. Using a semantic video technology, Affine could scan videos frame-by-frame and group them together by relevance, enabling advertisers and agencies to build their own channels or content to run campaigns against. The only problem? No one could pronounce ‘Affine’.” Read more

During the recent SemTech SF event I met with Thomas Steiner of Google Italy to discuss a recent project entitled “SemWebVid.” In addition to working for Google, Steiner is working on his Ph.D. at UPC.edu in Barcelona, Spain. I found Steiner’s project fascinating because it provides a glimpse at how semantic technology will change the way we view, find, and interact with online video in future.

The SemWebVid project is part of a European Union research project entitled “I-SEARCH.”  Google, in addition to other companies, is one of the industry sponsors of this project. All of the research from this project is being done “in the open” and the findings are available to the public via published papers.

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