We are funded by the European Project
GLOCAL. Glocal deals primarily with organizing information around events, and our research focuses on the geographic context of events, as well as ways to leverage user-generated content.
The GLOCAL Vision in a Nutshell
We describe the world using words. But words often call to mind different mental views of the world to different people, because of their differing personal experience and contexts. As a result, the semantic gap between our verbally expressed conceptualizations of the world and our actual experience of the world – which is most directly represented by media such as photos and videos – is far beyond the reach of current multimedia systems.
Hence we don’t yet have a universal way of contextualizing search, navigation and media management according to users’ needs and their operating environments.
A key idea underlying the Integrating Project
GLOCAL is to use events as the primary means for organizing and indexing media. Events have a local and a global dimension. The local dimension involves the assignment of tags (conceptualizations) to media (personal experiences). The global dimension involves the sharing of general event structures and specific event descriptions, which enables social sharing and networking of events, tags and media.
Within networked communities, common (global) descriptions of the world can be built and continuously enriched by a continuous flow of individual (local) descriptions.
With two leading search companies and four content providers, the
GLOCAL consortium will be able to realize and evaluate the
GLOCAL approach in several application domains, which will involve professional and amateur users dealing with professional and generic contents.