“Annotating is a way of describing a document in order to make it easier to understand and interpret its content, and thus facilitate access and reuse. Today, annotations are done manually by specialised staff. This task is usually very time-consuming, which has financial consequences and causes thousands of hours of contents to be unknown. To respond to this problem we created an alternative process that we hope will contribute to make available contents from large video archives with economic and social interest,” states Paula Viana, the CTM researcher and ISEP professor who developed the prototype with José Pedro Pinto, also from CTM.

This system uses collaborative processes based on crowdsourcing concepts, communities and games in order to collect metadata that can describe video contents.

“By associating video timecodes, the system improves the process of searching and accessing contents. The system implements algorithms to validate the tags inserted in order to guarantee that the annotations are reliable without human intervention, and provides mechanisms that motivate players according to the success/quality of their contributions,” the researcher explains.

The gamification concepts, that is, using gaming mechanisms to solve practical problems in the annotation task include: defining different levels of difficulty in the game, giving scores according to the degree of agreement between players, giving awards when players reach certain pre-defined targets, and others.

This project - "NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000061" – is funded by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme ("ON.2 - O Novo Norte"), of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), and also by National Funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology  (FCT).

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and IPP-ISEP.

CTM/INESC TEC, April 2015