At last: video search that works

CSIRO has developed an interactive plugin for browsing through webs of video.

The free Annodex™ plugin for Mozilla Firefox gives users the ability to use text queries to search for video clips, watch a selection, then seamlessly hyperlink to further video, audio or web content. When used with a Web search engine, video search now works just like users expect.

Unlike other recently released video search tools, an Annodex™ search delivers actual video content. Tools such as Google’s beta video search work by searching a program’s closed captioning text. The search results simply provide an excerpt from the text and a single still image from the program. In contrast an Annodex™ search provides the user with a detailed summary of the video content, an interactive list of video clips, and hyperlinks to additional material.

Project leader Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, says that the applications of Annodex™ are many and varied.

„Users are discouraged by the complexity of search for clips within vast online multimedia collections. They are demanding a technology that lets them actively search for content,“ says Dr Pfeiffer.

„Annodex™ and the standards behind it allow them to do just that – it will revolutionise the way we search for time-continuous data. Annodex™ also allows video content to be explored using any digitally networked device – including mobile phones, handheld PDAs and digital TV.“

Besides entertainment, Annodex™ has many other practical applications such as searching medical information, environmental measurements and network load statistics – on demand.“

The groundbreaking technology behind Annodex™ is known as Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML). CMML does for time-continuous media what HTML does for text. It allows the user to search, access, navigate and query.

Further to the free Annodex™ browser, Dr Pfeiffer’s team have developed an easy-to-use graphical authoring tool to allow publishers of video content to add the required metadata and captioning to their work so the material can be successfully searched.

A demonstration of the Annodex™ technology and the free Firefox plugin can be found at www.annodex.net .

Annodex™ is a collaborative project of the CSIRO ICT Centre and the Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE). CeNTIE is supported by the Australian Government through the Advanced Networks Program (ANP) of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.