About
The ultimate goal of the project was to develop a flexible and adaptive end-to-end architecture based on semantic technologies for the personalised creation, distribution, and consumption of TV content. The project took a user-centric approach to investigate fundamental aspects of consumers’ content-customisation needs, interaction requirements, and entertainment wishes, which shaped the future of television in its new forms. New technology transformed the TV industry, as noted by Mark Thompson, BBC Director General, in the Observer. Watching TV increasingly occurred alongside PC-related activities, such as chatting with friends, talking on the phone, and searching the Internet for related information about programs. In 2000, the trend was exemplified by “couch-and-mouse toys,” which served 27 million Americans who could watch TV and surf the web simultaneously—termed “telewebbers.” At that time, digital video-recording software provided the facility to “time-shift” live television programming through a PC (e.g., via TiVo and ReplayTV). Companies attempted to bundle electronic program guides into their software, along with personal viewing agents that could recommend broadcast programs based on viewing habits. For example, while watching “Dancing with the Stars,” viewers could vote for their favourite couple, read their biographies, find other programs featuring them that week, record favourite dances, and send them to friends; they could also join live chats during the program. However, such interactive services remained TV-centric in the device sense and utilised Internet and digital technology only to enhance the expected entertainment experience.
Thus, the core objectives of the project targeted putting the TV viewer back in the driver’s seat by developing semantics-based and context-aware tools and services for personalised content selection, packaging content with additional information (e.g., relevant web info on program subjects), and enabling social interaction in consumer communities. The semantic-based aspect involved building on information integration and representation techniques developed within the Semantic Web area, enabling reasoning about related concepts across different information sources. Context-aware services depended on individual aspects of time, space, task, and mood.
To realise this vision, the NoTube project delivered a service-oriented architecture with four cornerstones: the novel deployment of existing methods for information integration in the combined TV-Internet environment; extensions of existing user and context modelling techniques to meet the demands of the distributed world; the development of novel reasoning services for personalised content recommendation; and the integration of community-oriented software and social interaction tools, such as chat channels.
The work in the project was steered by three visionary use cases, namely personalised semantic news, personalised TV guide with adaptive advertising, and Internet TV in the Social Web. These use cases addressed different dimensions of personalised TV-content interaction, including individual viewers and communities of viewers, as well as multilingual and multimodal interaction. The work plan took an iterative approach, with progressively complex demonstrators developed in each cycle. User-centred evaluation drove each iteration, and the demonstrators were critical for defining measurable success factors for the project.
In short, NoTube became the first project to focus on TV content as a medium for personalised interaction among people based on a service architecture that catered to various content metadata, delivery channels, and rendering devices.
Team
John Domingue
Dong Liu
Hong Qing Yu
Publications
Maleshkova, M., Pedrinaci, C., Li, N., Kopecky, J. and Domingue, J. (2011) Lightweight Semantics for Automating the Invocation of Web APIs, IEEE International Conference on Service Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA 2011), Irvine, California, USA.
Maleshkova, M., Zilka, L., Knoth, P. and Pedrinaci, C. (2011) Cross-Lingual Web API Classification and Annotation, Workshop: The Multilingual Semantic Web at 10th International Semantic Web Conference, Proceedings of ISWC 2011, Bonn, Germany.
Liu, D., Li, N., Pedrinaci, C., Kopecky, J., Maleshkova, M. and Domingue, J. (2011) An Approach to Construct Dynamic Service Mashups using Lightweight Semantics, Workshop: The 3rd International Workshop on Lightweight Integration on the Web (ComposableWeb 2011) at The 11th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2011).
Dietze, S., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2011) SmartLink: a Web-based editor and search environment for Linked Services, Demo at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, Heraklion, Greece.
Dietze, S., Gugliotta, A., Domingue, J. and Mrissa, M. (2011) Mediation Spaces for Similarity-based Semantic Web Services Selection, International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR), Volume 8, Issue 1 (2011), IGI Global.
Dietze, S., Gugliotta, A., Domingue, J., Yu, H.Q. and Mrissa, M. (2010) An automated Approach to Semantic Web Services Mediation, Springer Service-Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA), Vol. 4, Issue 4 (2010), pp. 261, Springer.
Dietze, S., Benn, N., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Makni, B., Liu, D., Lambert, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Comprehensive service semantics and light-weight Linked Services: towards an integrated approach, Workshop: Fourth International Workshop SMR2 2010 on Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web at 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Shanghai, China.
Dietze, S., Benn, N., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Siebes, R., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Towards two-stage service representation & reasoning: from lightweight annotations to comprehensive semantics, Poster at EKAW2010 – 17th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Lisbon, Portugal.
Makni, B., Dietze, S. and Domingue, J. (2010) Towards a hybrid Semantic Web Services approach, Poster at Proceedings of the Royal Society Discussion Meeting ‘Web Science: A New Frontier’, London, UK.
Orthuber, W. and Dietze, S. (2010) Towards Standardized Vectorial Resource Descriptors on the Web, Workshop: GI 2010 Workshop on “Web Science” at Annual meeting of the German Society for Computer Science (GI) 2010, Leipzig, Germany.
Makni, B., Dietze, S. and Domingue, J. (2010) Towards Semantic TV Services – A Hybrid Semantic Web Services Approach, Doctoral Consortium, Future Internet Symposium 2010, Berlin, Germany.
Lambert, D., Benn, N. and Domingue, J. (2010) Integrating Heterogeneous Web Service Styles with Flexible Semantic Web Services Groundings, Workshop: 1st International Future Enterprise Systems Workshop (FES2010) at 3rd Future Internet Symposium (FIS2010), Berlin, Germany.
Yu, H.Q., Benn, N., Dietze, S., Siebes, R., Pedrinaci, C., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Two-staged approach for semantically annotating and brokering TV-related services, The IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Miami, Florida.
Yu, H.Q., Dietze, S. and Benn, N. (2010) Semantic TV-resources brokering towards future television, Workshop: The 1st NoTube Workshop on Future Television: integrating the Social and Semantic Web at EuroITV 2010 – 8th European Conference on Interactive TV and Video, Tampere, Finland.
Yu, H.Q. and Makni, B. (2010) Semantic TV-Services Brokering Towards Future Television, Poster at STI International Symposium 2010, Crete, Greece.
Benn, N. (2010) Using the cDnS ontology as upper-level for a Scholarly Debate Ontology, Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2010), Toronto, Canada, IOS Press.
Dietze, S., Domingue, J., Mrissa, M. and Gugliotta, A. (2010) Context-Aware Semantic Web Service Discovery through Metric-based Situation Representations, in eds. Quan Z. Sheng, Jian Yu, Schahram Dustdar, Enabling Context-Aware Web Services: Methods, Architectures, and Technologies, Chapman & Hall / CRC Press.
Dietze, S., Benn, N., Domingue, J., Conconi, A. and Cattaneo, F. (2009) Two-Fold Semantic Web Service Matchmaking – Applying Ontology Mapping for Service Discovery, 4th Asian Semantic Web Conference, Shanghai, China.
Dietze, S., Benn, N., Domingue, J., Conconi, A. and Cattaneo, F. (2009) Interoperable Multimedia Metadata through Similarity-based Semantic Web Service Discovery, SAMT 2009, The 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies, Graz, Austria.
Aroyo, L., Nixon, L. and Dietze, S. (2009) Television and the Future Internet: the NoTube project, Poster at Future Internet Symposium (FIS) 2009, Berlin, Germany.
Dietze, S., Orthuber, W. and Domingue, J. (2009) Blending the Physical and the Digital through Conceptual Spaces, Workshop: OneSpace 2009 at Future Internet Symposium (FIS) 2009, Berlin, Germany.
Dietze, S., Gugliotta, A. and Domingue, J. (2009) Exploiting Metrics for Similarity-based Semantic Web Service Discovery, IEEE 7th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2009), Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Dietze, S. and Domingue, J. (2009) Enriching Service Semantics through Conceptual Vector Spaces, Workshop: Workshop on Ontology, Conceptualization and Epistemology for Information Systems, Software Engineering and Service Science (ONTOSE’09) at The 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE’09), Amsterdam, NL.
Aroyo, L., Conconi, A., Dietze, S., Kaptein, A., Nixon, L., Nufer, C., Palmisano, D., Vignaroli, L. and Yankova, M. (2009) NoTube – Making TV a Medium for Personalized Interaction, EuroITV 2009, Leuven, Belgium.
Dietze, S. and Domingue, J. (2009) Towards Context-aware Multimedia Processing through Semantic Web Services, EuroITV 2009, Leuven, Belgium.
Mrissa, M., Dietze, S., Thiran, P., Ghedira, C., Benslimane, D. and Maamar, Z. (2009) Context-based Semantic Mediation in Web Service Communities Context-based Semantic Mediation in Web Service Communities, in eds. Irvine King, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Weaving Services, Location, and People on the WWW, Springer.
Dietze, S. and Tanasescu, V. (2009) Spatial Groundings for meaningful Symbols, Workshop: Workshop on Matching and Meaning 2009 at AISB Convention, Edinburgh, UK.
