SemanticMetadata.net

ACM Communications now available as “Digital Edition”

Today the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that their flagship journal, the ACM Communications, are available as digital edition. While single articles have been available at the ACM Portal now a paper like digital edition is available within the browser or even as PDF download. I think this is a good idea, especially when I look at the huge stack of Communications in my office Find the current issue here. Note that this might only work when you have an account. I cannot try as I’m within an IP range with access rights.

SeamCarving Plugin for ImageJ

Ulf Dittmer has published a seam carving plugin for ImageJ today. ImageJ is a Java based image manipulation and processing tool with a very active developer community. It’s running on Windows, Linux and Mac and its open source.

Related links:

• ImageJ home page
• Ulf Dimmer’s plugin page
• ImageJ on Wikipedia

Multimedia Metadata Community meets @ WIAMIS 2008

The Multimedia Metadata Community meets next at the M3R workshop (special session) on the WIAMIS 2008. The WIAMIS 2008 takes place in Klagenfurt, Austria in May. Some days ago the final list of papers was published:

• Digital Rights Metadata Management and Retrieval on Structured Overlay Networks -Walter Allasia (Eurixgroup, IT), Francesco Gallo (Eurixgroup, IT), Marco Milanesio (Universita’ degli Studi di Torino, IT), Rossano Schifanella (University of Torino, IT), Filippo Chiariglione (CEDEO.net, IT), Angelo Difino (CEDEO.net, IT)
• Mobile Context-Aware Semantic Multimedia Tagging on the MobSOS Testbench – Dominik Renzel (RWTH Aachen University, DE), Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, DE), Marc Spaniol (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
• A new type of contextual information based on the adaptation authorisation – Anna Carreras (Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya, ES), Jaime Delgado (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, ES)
• Efficient Transformation of MPEG-21 Metadata for Codec-agnostic Adaptation in Real-time Streaming Scenarios – Michael Ransburg (Klagenfurt University, AT), Hubert Gressl (Klagenfurt University, AT), Hermann Hellwagner (Klagenfurt University, AT)
• An MPEG-7 Extension for Describing Visual Impairments – Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research, AT), Peter Schallauer (JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, AT)
• Extending Folksonomies for Image Tagging – Roman Kern (Know-Center Graz, AT), Michael Granitzer (Know-Center Graz, AT), Viktoria Pammer (Know-Center Graz, AT)
• Revisiting the Vector Retrieval Model in Context of the MPEG-7 Semantic Description Scheme -Mathias Lux (University of Klagenfurt, AT)
• Visual attention metadata from pictures browsing -Benoit Baccot (INPT-Enseeiht, FR), Cezar Plesca (Technical Military Academy ATM, RO), Vincent Charvillat (IRIT-ENSEEIHT, FR), Romulus Grigoras (Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, FR)

Presenting MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 Videos on the Web with Flash 9

While Adobe Flash (former Macromedia Flash) managed to take the top position of WWW based tools for watching video it was stuck with these flv video files for a long time. With version 9 now H.264 (or AVC as it is called in context of MPEG-4) encoded videos are supported along with popular container formats like mp4, mov or 3gp. Or in short words: Flash can now play iPod and PSP videos.

Now for the meat: How to get your AVC files into a web page?

• Encode your video file. Use MediaCoder or any other tool to create an iPod or PSP compatible video. Take care that you select AVC for your target codec. It’s called MPEG-4 AVC in the PSP as well as in the iPod extension of Mediacoder for example (see screenshot).
• Download the FLV Mediaplayer and unzip it somewhere.
• Create a website where your video should be played and move the FLV Mediaplayer along with associated files and the video in a subdirectory of the page’s directory.
• Use the setup wizard to create the code for embedding your player.
  • Select “Mediaplayer with a single FLV”
  • Source: [relative subdirectory]/mediaplayer.flv
  • Fill in width & height (you chose it in your encoding tool)
  • Put down the path to the .mp4 file
• Copy the resulting code to your web page and test it in a browser

That’s the easiest way to present a video. More sophisticated methods include streaming or configuring the player with JavaScript. You can also add playlists, show a logo and jump to timepoints.

Related Links

•  Here is also a tutorial on how to embed the mediaplayer on your page
  

The iBlue 747 GPS Logger

Recently I bought the iBlue 747 GPS Logger after reading the review on Cool Tools. While most GPS devices sold here are based on the SiRF star III chip, the 747 is based on the MTK chipset. This allows the user to fill the internal memory easily before you run out of power instead of the other way round. For more detailed information I found a extensive review on gpspassion.com.

From my point of view the device is good enough. Memory holds up to 70.ooo waypoints and there is enough power for a long hike, walk or bike tour. The software however is somewhat limited. I recommend to use the Java open source software BT747 for downloading the track logs and allows to convert them to Google Earth files, Google Map HTMLs (for sending by email), GPX or NMEA. This tool is rather complicated to use but works fine as soon as you managed to let it do what you want. One will also need the driver, but all instructions are given in the howto of the bt747 software.

What took some time for me to realize was that the internal memory of the iBlue 747 was 16 Mbit, which is 2 MByte. This was quite a shock (as I misread it first), but as already mentioned its enough for ~ 70k track points. The GPS mouse function comes handy when navigating with my mobile phone, which – just to mention – has the same battery type as the gps device One thing that disturbs me somewhat: I’d like to have a device where track logs can be downloaded using plain USB (like from a USB storage device) not serial over USB, which is awfully slow. Also I’d like to have GPS that works inside the house too

Geo tagging of photos also works fine, there are several tools available. I’ve tested the GPS Log Analyzer and GeoSetter, which both work fine. The locr tool seems to produce GPS Exif metadata that can’t be read from Google Picasa. Flickr recognizes the geo tags also, but you have to activate the import of those in your privacy settings.

Report from Barcamp Senza Confini

I already blogged about my presentation at the barcamp, but here is a followup report on the first day: The first glance at the registration desk showed that this was organized perfectly. The welcome session started well scheduled and was moderated by Georg Holzer. Right after that Monika Meurer talked about running a blog for a living. She and Achim Meurer had a whole lot of knowledge to share on this topic (see for instance here and here). After Monika’s talk I did my own presentation and went to lunch.

The afternoon started for me with the WikiQuiz presentation of Andreas Augustin. This is a collaborative game supporting user generated as well as semi-automatically generated questions for a Trivial Pursuit style game. After that I talked to a whole lot of people while drinking coffee and missed some sessions. I got back onto track right time for seeing Zemanta, a machine learning based tool for blog post link, image and tag recommendations. The tool is impressive, but also the startup story was fascinating. The Zemanta guys talked about Seedcamps and venture capitalists, things & concepts far away from my current environment

After that some more discussion followed and the last two tracks were the Flex Intro from Trinitec and the Lightning Talk session, where each presenter only had 3 minutes to perform.

Related links:

• Zurück vom Barcamp Senza Confini
• BarCamp Senza Confini Day 1
• Lessons learned at Barcamp Klagenfurt
• BarCamp Senza Confini 2008: 2nd day
• Barcamp Senza Confini Rückblick
• 360° picture of the participants
• Flickr photos from the barcamp
• … and more

The Clock of the Noxon

As pround owner of a Terratec Noxon 2 I eventually try to use all the features Terratec offers. I’m impressed what this little thing can do for me and (in combination of a TwonkyMedia server) it replaces all HiFi stuff in my living room. It plays digital music (mainly MP3, but als OGG and AAC) OTA from my UPnP AV server and the USB stick plugged into its side. Shoutcast streams are stored in the favorites, which can be edited via web interface. Sound is great and connectivity just works. However there is one thing I do not manage: I never get the clock right. The Noxon has a big clock, which would definitely be a feature for my living room, but it is set automatically and is wrong all the time So Teratec: Where is the firmware update?

My Presentation @ Barcamp Senza Confini

Today the barcamp senza confini started. The organization was a charm, everything went perfect (kudos go to Georg Holzer and the whole team). The first day was great and I heard of a lot of interesting ideas and talked to a lot of interesting people. For myself I chose a short slot and I did the presentation on “Popularity, Power Laws and Interestingness” mentioned in the last post. Although a bit technical I hope I managed to describe some basic concepts as well as my idea. However for later review, here are my slides:

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Barcamp Senza Confini 2008 (Klagenfurt Austria)

Just one minute ago I proposed my session on the barcamp wiki. Looking forward to a hopefully funny & interesting presentation and to a heterogeneous audience. My talk will be about Power Laws, Popularity & Interestingness and I will try to shed some light on the nature of popularity in web 2.0. I also give you one slide of my presentation in advance