The objectives of the ECHO project are to develop a long term reusable software infrastructure to support digital film archives, to provide Web-based access to collections of historical documentary films of great international value and to increase the productivity and cost effectiveness of producing digital film archives.

The ECHO project will develop and demonstrate an open architecture approach to distribute digital film archive services. The open architecture will support service extensibility and interoperability.

The distinct features of the ECHO system will be:

• semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition from digital film information
• speech-recognizers in Italian, French, Dutch and German for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval
• cross-language retrieval capabilities
• intelligent access to digital films
• automatic film summary creation (Automatic Video Abstracting is part of the MoCA-library)
• privacy and billing mechanisms

• to improve the accessibility, and searchability of large historical audio visual archives
• to advance the use and usability of globally distributed, networked film collections
• to increase the interoperability (including interoperability between languages) and integration of digital film collections and services
• to encourage the study of interaction between humans and digital film archives in various social and organizational contexts
• to contribute to the definition of standards on relevant topics in the digital film domain
• to contribute to a better valorization and exploitation of an important part of the European cultural heritage: the historical film archives which document the evolution of the European communities during this century
• to contribute to the strengthening of the European IT industry by encouraging the take-up of the new digital technologies

ECHO final report

2003 Contact: Stephan Kopf