André Pang’s scientific contributions

The World Wide Web, with its paradigms of surfing and searching for information, has become the predominant system for computer-based information retrieval. Media resources, however information-rich, only play a minor role in providing information to Web users. While bandwidth (or the lack thereof) may be an excuse for this situation, the lack of surfing and searching capabilities on media resources are the real issue. We present an architecture that extends the Web to media, enabling existing Web infrastructures to provide seamless search and hyperlink capabilities for time-continuous Web resources, with only minor extensions. This makes the Web a true distributed information system for multimedia data. The article provides an overview of the specifications that have been developed and submitted to the IETF for standardization. It also presents experimental results with prototype applications.

The Continuous Media Web project has developed a technology to extend the Web to time-continuously sampled data enabling seamless searching and surfing with existing Web tools. This chapter discusses requirements for such an extension of the Web, contrasts existing technologies and presents the Annodex technology, which enables the creation of Webs of audio and video documents. To encourage uptake, the specifications of the Annodex technology have been submitted to the IETF for standardisation and open source software is made available freely. The Annodex technology permits an integrated means of searching, surfing, and managing a World Wide Web of textual and media resources.

One of the goals of the Continuous Media Web project1 is to integrate digital media with the World Wide Web: media documents can hyperlink to and from other documents in the same way that HTML pages do. The dual capabilities of hyperlinking (1) to other documents while viewing a media clip, and (2) into precise time intervals in a media clip, enable greatly improved user interaction with media. We discuss the idea of a novel media browser application, which merges the concept of a traditional media player that presents video and audio to the user, with a Web browser that provides hyperlinking and navigation between networked (media) documents. The particular issue we address in this article concerns the primary navigational features: a media player relies on a playlist while a Web browser uses a browsing history for navigation. We discuss design and user interface issues that arise when integrating these two navigational features in a media browser.

This demonstration introduces the Annodex set of technologies, which enable the creation of Webs of audio and video resources integrated into the searching and surfing infrastructure of the World Wide Web. The demonstration covers the live creation of Annodex content and thus of Webs of video and audio, the setup of a Web server to distribute Annodex resources, the use of a Web browser to hyperlink between clips of Annodex resources, and the use of a Web search engine in which media clips can be searched through text queries.