Still don’t understand why the Financial Times preferred the rag side rather than the informative editing about the European "Quaero" project. Is it a political or technical comprehension weakness or both?
Anyway, here is an Abstract from my personal cache memory.
Integrated tools for handling multimedia content:
The merge of content, broadcasting and telecoms industries gives rise to a new paradigm. This new sector is inherent in the development of recent disruptive technologies (e.g. digitalisation, high bandwidth, high definition) and new consummer behaviors (e.g nomad-tv viewers, video on demand, e-commere). The growth of those technologies leads to an awesome increase of the accessible information diversity and volume of multimedia content (sound, fixed and animated images). The production, preservation, access and protection of Digital “heritage” are key political strategic objectives.
3D, audio and video quality enhancement plus all (current) images and textual data available on the net can only be relevant if there were enough information retrieval and search tools available for private and public uses. Furthermore, end-users also expect assistance in the content interpretation, e.g for “scene” recognition or automated translation. The Quaero project aims to answer these questions in developing the suitable technology and environment for searching and interpreting multilingual and multimedia content in browsing the human knowledge.
Briefly, Quaero will develop/(is currently developing) “unified” solutions into the following fields:
Electronic signature & earmark
and the common denominator is multimedia content.