Toward a more diverse collaboration in European science

Europe is unique: it is a powerful economic community that strives for political and cultural equality and diversity. But keeping all linguistic groups on an equal footing can be a complicated task, in particular when it comes to information systems.

Multilingual and multimedia information systems are increasingly complex: they need to satisfy diverse user needs and support complex tasks. Their development calls for proper evaluation methodologies to ensure that they meet user requirements and provide the desired effectiveness. In addition, new internet paradigms are continually extending the length and breadth of the media, making the task of multilingual interaction ever more daunting.

The EU-funded project PROMISE ('Participative research laboratory for multimedia and multilingual information systems evaluation'), coordinated by the University of Padua, encompasses a wide-ranging research team brought together to consider multilingualism and multiculturalism in information systems.

Language, of course, isn't the only thing that separates countries and cultures. There are also fundamental differences in the ways we approach, measure and evaluate what we do and see. Information systems must be able to deal with these differences. Accurate and repeatable measurements represent a key to progress in many areas, particularly in the sciences, where, more and more, vast consolidated datasets now embody common resources.

For any large-scale experimental research providing a coherent contribution to today's science, researchers need to apply established evaluation procedures, comparison and benchmarking of adopted approaches. Also, it must be able to share the knowledge generated, all of which depends on the latest information systems.

Again, PROMISE is providing a virtual multicultural laboratory for conducting cooperative research and experimentation while employing complex information systems.

Project researchers are facilitating management and offering access, curation, preservation, re-use, analysis, visualisation, and mining of collected multilingual and multicultural experimental data.

The project hopes its work will ultimately help to promote collaboration and sharing of Europe's acquired knowledge-base; stimulating knowledge transfer and uptake, while enabling fuller inclusion and participation, and real EU-wide harmonisation.

Some of the research done by the team includes a review of a decade of studies on information acquisition, inspection and interpretation of user interaction using Web search engine log analysis and Digital Library System log analysis.

They also reported on an analysis of content-based audiovisual retrieval practices. The researchers found that retrieval performance on an audiovisual archive can be significantly improved when content-based methods are applied to search.

For another study the researchers introduced the task of mapping search engine queries to DBpedia, a major linking hub in the Linking Open Data cloud. They proposed and compared various methods for this task, using a mixture of information retrieval and machine learning techniques.

PROMISE received around EUR 4.4 million from the EU and involved partners from Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, the UK, Sweden, France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The project ends in August 2013.

Related link:
http://cordis.europa.eu