Invitation for Participation

Digital archiving of multimedia content including video, audio, still images and various types of documents has been recognized by content holding organizations as a mature choice for the preservation, preview and partial distribution of their assets. The advances in information technology and telecommunications along with the success of standardization efforts of audiovisual content boosted the movement of the archives towards the conversion of their fragile and manually indexed material to digital, computer accessible data. By the end of last century the question was not on whether digital archives are technically and economically viable, rather on how digital archives would be efficient and informative. In this framework, different scientific fields such as, on the one hand, development of database management systems, and on the other hand, processing and analysis of multimedia data, as well as artificial and computational intelligence methods, have observed a close cooperation with each other during the last few years. The attempt has been to develop intelligent human computer interaction systems, enabling the user to access vast amounts of heterogeneous information stored in different archives.

The workshop targets to promote interaction and discussion between a large number of participants involved in the cross-disciplinary area of digitization, archival, preservation, access and unification of audiovisual archives. For this purpose the workshop will bring together digital content providers, TV broadcasters, service providers and archives, public or private film, video and image repositories, media publishers, internet and web service providers, equipment manufacturers, network operators, researchers and technology experts. The workshop will address technical, business and social aspects of intelligent access to audiovisual archives, aiming to exchange concepts from research achievements and industrial prototypes.

The workshop is supported by the EC IST-1999-20502 project FAETHON (http://image.ntua.gr/faethon) and hosted by the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Greece.