The new TIB|AV Portal by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover recently went online. More than 1,800 quality-tested scientific films from the realms of engineering, architecture, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science are now available at av.getinfo.de. The AV Portal combines the easy, legally watertight publishing of scientific films with professional quality testing, and preserves cultural heritage thanks to digital preservation.
TIB's Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials (KNM) started developing the AV Portal in cooperation with the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI), the University Centre of Excellence in Systems Engineering affiliated to the University of Potsdam, in July 2011. Following the successful completion of the development phase, the video platform has now been launched for practical use. TIB's AV Portal has a clear added value compared to other video portals.
Automated video analysis with scene, speech, text and image recognition offers an innovative method of searching for films. The search results are connected to new knowledge by linking the data semantically.
The automatic, content-based provision of individual videos at the segment level enables users to search in a targeted, content-based manner: a visual table of contents provides a quick overview of the film content, facilitating access to individual film sequences in particular segments. Spoken and written language within the video (such as voice-overs, lecture slides or logos) is automatically recorded and can be searched for directly. Based on visual features in the film – such as colour distribution – each video is automatically assigned to a genre (such as an interview, a recording of a lecture or an experiment). By adding semantic information gained from video analysis to the data, explorative navigation of the stock can be performed, enabling connections between different AV media to be identified and searches to be conducted using synonyms, keywords and sub-categories. The wealth of visual material stored on the AV Portal will steadily grow over the months and years ahead. As the number of videos stored on the AV Portal grows, the results of automatic provision will continue to improve.
The scientific films will be connected to additional information such as digital full texts and research information via TIB's portal GetInfo, widening the search space considerably. Each video segment will also be given a digital object identifier, DOI for short, ensuring its clear, permanent citability. Video sequences can therefore now be cited as easily as texts.
The AV Portal offers users many advantages, such as innovative search, the possibility to access and cite individual segments, the ability to download, license and order films, and cross-media search.
