The Open Video Project

The Open Video Project is an on-going effort to develop an open source digital video collection that can be used by the information retrieval, digital library, and digital video research communities and ultimately serve an even broader audience. The idea is to acquire video that is in the public domain, or provided by owners who grant permission to use their intellectual property for research purposes, and make that video available in a variety of standard formats, along with a set of accompanying metadata. Researchers can then use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for segmentation, summarization and creation of surrogates that describe video content; or interfaces that display result sets from queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

The Open Video repository currently contains video and metadata for over 4000 digitized video segments. Videos range from a few seconds in duration to almost an hour, and include both color and black and white footage, as well as variation in several other characteristics.

While the intent of the Open Video Project is to provide a much-needed resource to the information retrieval, digital library, and digital video research communities, the nature of the repository will enable it to facilitate several other interesting research areas, including:

• Alternative user interfaces. Much of my research involves developing techniques and frameworks to improve information seeking through the use of alternative views. The video repository is expected to provide a rich source of content with which we can experiment with providing the overviews, previews, peripheral, and shared views that we believe will help a diverse range of users effectively access video content.


• Distributed storage and replication.The Open Video Project files are currently stored on high-capacity servers provided by the Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure project (I2-DSI) and serves as a prototype "community application" for exploring issues in the I2-DSI project.


• Open source community. The "open" and distributed nature of the repository will provide an on-going testbed for researchers interested in studying the development of an open source community effort, in this case one centered on digital content rather than software.

More Information

• Yang, M., Wildemuth, B. M., Marchionini, G., Wilkens, T., Geisler, G., Hughes, A., Gruss, R., and Webster, C. (2003). “Measuring User Performance During Interactions with Digital Video Collections.” Proceedings of the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST 2003), pp. 3-11.
• Wildemuth, B. M., Marchionini, G., Yang, M., Geisler, G., Wilkens, T., Hughes, A., and Gruss, R. (2003). “How Fast Is Too Fast? Evaluating Fast Forward Surrogates for Digital Video.” Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2003), pp. 221-230. (Vannevar Bush Award Winner for Best Paper at JCDL 2003)
• Marchionini, Gary and Geisler, Gary. (2002). “The Open Video Digital Library.” D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 8, Number 12, December.
• Wildemuth, B. M., Marchionini, G., Wilkens, T., Yang, M., Geisler, G., Fowler, B., Hughes, A., and Mu, X. (2002). “Alternative Surrogates for Video Objects in a Digital Library: Users Perspectives on Their Relative Usability.” Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries, September 16 - 18, 2002, Rome, Italy.
• Geisler, G., Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B. M., Yang, M., Hughes, A., Wilkens, T., and Spinks, R. (2002). "Video Browsing Interfaces for the Open Video Project." Proceedings of CHI 2002, Extended Abstracts.
• Geisler, G., Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B. M., Yang, M., Hughes, A., Wilkens, T., and Spinks, R. (2002). "Video Browsing Interfaces for the Open Video Project [video]." CHI 2002 Video Proceedings.
• Geisler, Gary, Marchionini, Gary, Nelson, Michael, Spinks, Richard and Yang, Meng (2001). "Interface Concepts for the Open Video Project." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science, November, 2001, 58-75.
• Nelson, Michael L., Marchionini, Gary, Geisler, Gary, and Yang, Meng (2001). "A Bucket Architecture for the Open Video Project [short paper]." JCDL ’01, ACM - IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (June 24-28, 2001, Roanoke, Virginia). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 310-311.
• Geisler, Gary, and Gary Marchionini (2000). "The Open Video Project: A Research-Oriented Digital Video Repository [short paper]." In Digital Libraries '00: The Fifth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (June 2-7 2000, San Antonio, TX). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 258-259.
  
• Slaughter, L., Marchionini, G. and Geisler, G. (2000). "Open Video: A Framework for a Test Collection." Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Vol. 23(3). San Diego: Academic Press.
  
• Marchionini, Gary, Geisler, Gary, and Brunk, Ben (2000). "AgileViews: A Human-Centered Framework for Interfaces to Information Spaces." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science, November, 2000, 271-280.