The EVA conference was held at the National Gallery in London from July 22-26, 1996. Much of the sponsorship for the conference came from the European Community, and Europeans clearly dominated the conference. Out of over 40 papers/presentations, only 6 were from North America. EC companies dominated the small exhibition area, with only one Japanese company and a UK subsidary of a US company. I was able to attend thanks to funding from the Getty Information Institute.
The first 2 days of the conference were devoted to Workshops (which they call tutorials), and the last 3 days was a traditional conference. If there aren't too many requests, I can lend people the conference proceedings (which is in 3 volumes, one for each day).
What follows is a set of very personal observations; some of the details may be a little hazy because I was not able to write this up until about a month after the conference.
The European Community is moving aggressively into the Multimedia area.
The European Commission has established about a dozen funded programs to jump-start and coordinate European multimedia efforts,
and many of these have, in turn, funded dozens of specific programs.
The focus of some programs appears to be in R&D,
while others focus on industry/public-sector partnerships.
There are many efforts to create testbeds and model programs.
I have 1-2 page descriptions of about 100 of these funded projects
(primarily in the area of cultural heritage, intellectual property, and information technology),
as well as several of their "Call for Proposals".
The Canadian National Research Council has developed a hi-res
3-D digitizing camera and presentation system.
I've visted them and seen it, and this is a pretty incredible system.
A key use they've identified is museum applications
including exhibition kiosks (to allow visitors to view an object from any side,
as well as across a network from remote locations),
condition reporting,
and measurements of segments of the object.
There is even potential to output to a CAM system to create excellent object replicas
for sale within a museum store.
They plan to install a complete system in the Canadian Museum of Civilization
in January of 1997.
They want to bring this system to market,
but before doing so feel they need to stimulate some use
(in order to create a potential body of users).
They have had talks with Tom Kalil of the White House,
and would like to place a system somewhere in the US
where it might get some use and exposure.
I think that we should seriously consider finding a place for this system.
In the exhibition hall, NHK demonstrated their
3-D Art Appreciation System
(also known as their Hyper-Real Museum).
Users of the system manipulate a sort of ball
that they use to turn and rotate the high resolution object on the HDTV screen.
The 3-D models are embedded within a larger multimedia program
that incorporates text and sound,
and allows the user to choose between various options.
I also found some interest in developing metadata standards for 3-D images (see section on Metadata below).
The European Community's IMPRIMATUR Project (Intellectual Multimedia Property RIghts Model And Terminology for Universal Reference)
is an ambitious attempt to try to jump-start electronic commerce involving
digital multimedia material.
The project is bringing together major stakeholders
(multimedia creators, publishers, distributors, consumers, and technology and telecommunications specialists),
identifying what is needed
(both technically and politically)
in order to spur electronic commerce,
and constructing a model
rights management system
which (ideally) will take into consideration
the interests of all parties.
IMPRIMATUR focuses on technical, legal, and political issues.
Technically, IMPRIMATUR plans to:
Politically, IMPRIMATUR plans to:
The project is being led by Britain's
Authors' Collection Society,
and active participants include:
the Interactive Multimedia Association,
Bertelsmann Publishing,
Thomson Multimedia,
DigiCash,
the British Library,
and a host of other coporations and organizations.
Personally, I think that they're doing a great job at identifying
technical elements, infrastructure, and agreements
that will be necessary to make this work.
I think that it's important that this effort is being led by content producers
rather than publishers/distributors.
But I am a little skeptical that they will be effective in reaching a consensus
between all the stakeholders.
This is one of the only projects involving rights management
which is attempting to consider the consumer as a major stakeholder
(and incorporate fair use as part of the model),
but I have serious concerns that as soon as consensus-building becomes difficult,
consumer needs (particularly around fair use) will be jettisoned.
There was quite a bit of interest in issues surrounding image metadata
(though much of it was not articulated as such).
As we're in the middle of planning a conference on
image metadata standards,
I spent a lot of time probing for activities in this area.
So some items I've listed here were not being particularly promoted.
The SPIDER Project
(System of Protection for Images by Documentation, iDentification and Registration of digital files)
was the most interesting thing that I saw at this conference.
SPIDER combines two important elements:
(1) a system for registering ownership over an image, and
(2) tags embedded within the image (header and directory) that identify the image and its owner.
SPIDER provides a system for creators of digital images
to register each image with a central authority on a country-by-country basis
(somewhat analagous to ISBN numbers, but with ISO affiliates doing the number assignment).
The registration process involves sending to the central authority:
metadata describing the image and ownership,
a small (10K) subsample of the image,
and a key derived from values within the image.
The registration authority then sends back
an official registration number and time-stamp
which are then placed within the image header.
Subsequent disputes over ownership of the image
can be verified by a combination of timestamp information in the header
as well as records residing in the central authority.
But what is far more interesting about the SPIDER Project
is the way they use fields of metadata which they embed within the image.
As far as I can determine,
SPIDER is the first sophisticated use of header and directory information
within the SPIFF file format.
The SPIFF format is more standardized than TIFF
(having been designed by the ISO committee that brought us JPEG),
and more robust than JFIF.
It is upwardly compatible with JFIF,
so all JPEG viewers should be able to display SPIFF images
(even if they cannot read all the embedded metadata).
SPIDER has registered tags (fields) within the SPIFF directory structure including
those for identification
(title, description, version),
and for protection
(author, rights holder, protection level, contact information).
They also have registered a field for a small image derived from the whole image.
They have built a browser and viewer
that allows the user to conveniently display the metadata alongside the image.
I think that as we begin to develop metadata standards for images,
it will be useful to examine both the fields developed for the SPIDER project,
and the types of containers they have employed to house their metadata.
AVELEM, the company that developed SPIDER,
also has built a system called SCOPYR
--Saisie numerique et COnsultation d'images PYRamidales
(Digital image caputre and exploitation of pyramidal images).
SCOPYR is a system that links together different sizes of the same image
to make it very convenient to zoom in and out
or move to a particular quadrant of an image.
SCOPYR employs tiling
at the highest resolution levels
so that zooming in to a particular quadrant
does not require waiting for a huge image to load.
There was a great deal of interest in my presentation on the
Museum Educational Site Licensing Project.
I had my most lengthy discussions with people from:
For several years the
International Visual Arts Information Network (IVAIN)
has maintained a database of interactive multimedia projects, publications, and organizations.
They have published this ITEM
(Image TEchnology in Museums and art galleries)
database in print form approximately twice a year.
Beginning this Fall,
in cooperation with CIDOC
(the documentation committee of the International Conference of Museums),
they will begin providing access to this database via the WorldWide Web.
General information will be available to the public,
but the more detailed information will be password-controlled,
and only be accessible to those who subscribe.
Concentration on 3-D
IMPRIMATUR
Aquarelle
AQUARELLE is a R&D project supported by by the Telematics Application
Programme, Information Engineering sector of the European Union. The
objective of the project is to create a professional "Information Web" for
curators, researchers and publishers providing access to reference
information on the cultural heritage. The project is managed by ERCIM, the
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, namely Dr. A.
Michard. The project is carried out by a consortium bringing together
They also work with CIMI's Project CHIO and the Getty's GII.
Image Metadata
SPIDER, SCOPYR
Interest in MESL
Other interesting projects
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