Welcome to the Ariadne Research Group

Introduction

Research in the ARIADNE group focuses on content for learning applications and audio-visual material, including music collections. The overall goal is to provide flexible, effective and efficient access to large-scale collections in a way that goes beyond what typical search engines provide.

Research

More specifically, our research themes include:

1. Metadata: In order to enable flexible access to content and data, we need rich descriptions: these are typically called meta-data. We focus on the automatic generation and extraction of metadata as well as on so-called attention metadata that describe interactions with content, rather than just the content itself.
2. Interoperability: For large-scale open distributed collections of content, it is important to interlink heterogeneous networks of repositories, through federated search based approaches or metadata harvesting. In this context, we have coordinated the development of several technical standards, for learning object metadata, simple federated search and content models that define the internal structure of content, so as to enable reuse and repurposing.
3. Usability: User interfaces and aspects that influence the usability of information systems are the focus of this part of our work. We rely on information visualization to enable the analysis of the overall content of a large-scale repository. "Finding rather than searching" is based on context dependent indexation of and access to collections of music and learning objects. More recently, social information retrieval techniques for flexible access to large-scale collections of content rely on tags, shared bookmarks, and evaluations to provide flexible and efficient access to relevant content.

In 2006, we created two spin-off companies (Aristomusic and @mire ): we continue to collaborate with them in joint research. Our work is at the core of the technical infrastructure of the ARIADNE Foundation, and several European eContentPlus projects. We are deeply involved in technical standardization efforts in the IEEE LTSC and CEN/ISSS WSLT.

People

Ariadne research group consists of 9 researchers

Projects

Education

The Ariadne Research Group is responsible for all courses in the domain of databases, multimedia and human computer interaction.