The MICO project was successfully kicked-off with a two day partner meeting in Salzburg, 13-14 November 2013.
Twenty-two people from the MICO partners gathered in Salzburg to launch the MICO project. It was a hectic two day event experience with many presentations. In the words of the project coordinator Dr. Sebastian Schaffert:
The goals of MICO are ambitious so it is critical that we come together early and build the personal relationships needed to make MICO a success.
The MICO project brings together seven leading research and commercial organisations to make major progress in the area of cross-media extraction and querying.
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To validate the results of MICO, two demanding use cases have been defined. The first one in the area of video streaming is lead by InsideOut10 with their HelixCloud product. The goals are to make the current large amounts of video content more manageable and findable through better analysis and query techniques. InsideOut10 are especially excited about what they can do with the MICO technologies to improve their native recommendation applications. They hope to make substantial progress towards dynamic cross-media publishing, which promises to bring viewers and cross-media content more inline (here is InsideOut10 blog post on what they expect from MICO) .
In the second use case we have Chris Lintott from Zooniverse fame on board to apply MICO technologies to their Citizen Science platforms which have a user base of about 900,000 people. The MICO and Zooninverse teams are equally excited to be working together. As one of the MICO team members said, with Zooninverse on board, I hope to be able to tell my kids that…
I am building MICO to save lives
Making MICO a success will also depend on how easy the technology will be to access and configure. For this reason the underlying frameworks that wrap the cross-media extractors and querying engines will be the Apache projects Marmotta and Stanbol. Apache Stanbol will be the general purpose semantic analysis framework which will be plugged into the general purpose linked data publishing platform Apache Marmotta. These two frameworks combined ensure that developers, application builders and platform integrators can easily access and configure the MICO tools. At the kick-off meeting the two project were presented and demonstrated by the founding members Rupert Westenthaler for Apache Stanbol and Thomas Kurz for Apache Marmotta.
In the final session dealing with project communication, the coordinator stressed the importance of putting as much of the MICO work and results in the public space.
MICO with its open source foundation will engage the public in an open development dialogue.
The benefits of an open development dialogue approach is the ability to leverage on an engaged group of third-party developers and users to provide continuous testing and development feedback, that goes far beyond the capacity of the project consortium, as well as increase the user base for technology take-up.
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