Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support senseand decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response.

Given the current explosion of user-generated content driven by the ever-decreasing price of sensing and storage hardware the dream of capturing and archiving the entirety of a human life is slowly being realised. The Semantic Web, a discipline of Computer Science, aims to support the sharing and interoperation of knowledge using the Web’s infrastructure. This thesis aims to roadmap a framework utilising the principles and technologies underpinning the Semantic Web, enabling the vision of global knowledge sharing, in an open and policy aware manner, with the end aim of supporting a network for the exploitation of personal information. This sharing is facilitated through the adoption of a lingua franca, shared conceptualisations for domain knowledge, and some core design principles. The main focus of Semantic Web research has been the development of a web-scale knowledge-base whereby information is stored and exposed in a machine-readable format with the ultimate aim of aggregating information from disparate sources, allowing for statements to be contextualised with respect to others culminating in a web-scale knowledge resource accessible through standard protocols. The current popularity of social computing – Web 2.0 – where users post personal information to online communities is eluding to the fact that information, linked and shared within a social-context presents added value to the end-user. Given the sensitive nature of personal information, one may not wish to expose all of the information about them self to the World Wide Web, but may wish to benefit by linking to knowledge residing on this shared resource. This ability to store personal information privately, in ones own personal web-space and not on a third party server, whilst at the same time connecting to the publicly available information is presented as key challenge facing the Computer Science community today. Specific information pertaining to one aspect of a user’s activities, such as their picture taking habits or their geographic log, may not present a detailed account of a user’s actions, but as more information is pushed into the public domain and aggregation technologies mature individuals and their day-to-day activities will be easier to track. As more and more of our personal lives are pushed into the public domain, the notion of an online-persona is becoming more and more applicable to the average person. This thesis presents an infrastructure for the capturing and archival of autobiographical metadata, whereby information from multiple sensors is aggregated and stored in a personal Lifelog. The surrender of digital identity has become commonplace, for purposes ranging from commerce, marketing, social networking, government, receipt of services, travel or security, Lifelogging has the potential to reaffirm the individual’s control of his or her own digital identity. The Lifelog is a constructed identity that outweighs the others simply by weight of evidence, complexity and comprehensiveness. This thesis presents an infrastructure for the capture and exploitation of personal metadata to drive research into context aware systems. The aim is to expose ongoing research in the areas of capture of personal experiences, context aware systems, multimedia annotation systems, narrative generation, all set in the context of enabling and supporting the Semantic Web Vision. The thesis details the work underway towards the goal of creating a multi-domain contextual log, and is followed by a discussion of how such a log can be used to drive the development of detailed Lifelog and an investigation into the amount of personal information being pushed into the public domain.

This chapter describes Garlik's motivation, interest, and experiences of using Linked Data technologies in its online services. It describes the methodologies and approaches that were taken in order to deploy online services to hundreds of thousands of users, and describes the trade-offs inherent in our choice of these technologies for our production systems. In order to help illustrate and aid the arguments for the adoption of Semantic Web technologies this chapter will focus on two of our customer facing products, Data Patrol, a consumer-centric personal information protection product, and QDOS a Linked Data service that is used to measure peoples' online activity.

The growth of information acquisition, storage and retrieval capacity has led to the development of the practice of lifelogging, the undiscriminating collection of information concerning one's life and behaviour. There are potential problems in this practice, but equally it could be empowering for the individual, and provide a new locus for the construction of an online identity. In this paper we look at the technological possibilities and constraints for lifelogging tools, and set out some of the most important privacy, identity and empowerment-related issues. We argue that some of the privacy concerns are overblown, and that much research and commentary on lifelogging has made the unrealistic assumption that the information gathered is for private use, whereas, in a more socially-networked online world, much of it will have public functions and will be voluntarily released into the public domain.

The OpenKnowledge system needs to be able to deal with all kinds of data and to that end we cannot impose any formal data structures on the variables that occur within the interaction models. However, we can show that using a common format for some operations will make the system more interoperable without the need for creating translation services. We show here that using a single translation service that can transfer between an MPEG-7 representation, we can provide some multimedia manipulation services that when combined provide complex applications built in

The growth of information acquisition, storage and retrieval capacity has led to the development of the practice of lifelogging, the undiscriminating collection of information concerning one's life and behaviour. There are potential problems in this practice, but equally it could be empowering for the individual, and provide a new locus for the construction of an online identity. In this paper we look at the technological possibilities and constraints for lifelogging tools, and set out some of the most important privacy, identity and empowerment-related issues. We argue that some of the privacy concerns are overblown, and the major issues will be concerned with surveillance. We also argue that much research and commentary on lifelogging has made the unrealistic assumption that the information gathered is for private use, whereas, in a more socially-networked online world, much of it will have public functions and will be voluntarily released into the public domain.

Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support sense- and decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response.

OpenKnowledge is a peer-to-peer system for sharing knowledge and is driven by interaction models that give the necessary context for mapping of ontological knowledge fragments necessary for the interaction to take place. The OpenKnowledge system is agnostic to any specific data formats that are used in the interactions, relying on ontology mapping techniques for shimming the messages. The potentially large search space for matching ontologies is reduced by the shared context of the interaction. In this paper we investigate what this means for multimedia data on the OpenKnowledge network by discussing how an existing application that provides multimedia annotation (the Semantic Logger) can be migrated into the OpenKnowledge domain.

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend.

Personal information and the act of publishing multimedia artifacts to the World Wide Web is becoming more and more observable. This report presents an infrastructure for the capturing and exploitation of personal metadata to drive research into context aware systems. I aim to expose ongoing research in the areas of capture of personal experiences, context aware systems, multimedia annotation systems, narrative generation, and that of Semantic Web enabling technologies. This report details the work underway towards the goal of creating a multidomain contextual log, and is followed by a discussion of how this work is being used to drive the development of a multimedia asset management system infrastructure. Practical work already completed as part of this project is then described, focusing on the areas of data integration, infrastructure, and personal photo collection annotation, all in the Semantic Web context. The future plan draws together the work completed and presents how the autobiographical context captured will be evaluated to provide insight into the utility of the metadata harnessed to aid human memory management. This is followed by the proposed evaluation of how suitable semi-automatically captured metadata can be to facilitate the construction of a narrative of a person’s observable life.

We outline a simple taxonomy of approaches to modelling narrative, explain how these might be realised ontologically, and describe our continuing work to apply these techniques to the problem of Memories for Life.

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to spend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to manage their collections. This poster outlines Photocopain, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information extracted from the content of the image. These automatically generated annotations are then presented to the user for extension or alteration as need be. This work is presented as an initial investigation into the applicability of surreptitiously captured metadata to describe the events of a person’s observable life.

The Semantic Logger1 (SL) is presented as a system for the importing, housing, and exploiting of personal information. The system has been implemented using a number of Semantic Web enabling technologies, and attempts to store the information in a manner adhering to as many W3C recommendations as possible. The Semantic Logger's utility is grounded in two context-based applications, namely a recommender system, and a photo-annotation tool.

This paper presents a theoretical discussion of semantically enabled technologies that adopt narrative theories to aid knowledge transfer. The paper aims to present the applicability of existing narrative theories as methods of transferring and retrieving knowledge, underlying the importance of semantic mark-up.

This paper describes the OntoMedia ontology, an ontology for describing the semantic content of hetrogeneous media. We present our motivation for creating this ontology and consider how it relates to similar ontologies in the bibliographic and multimedia domains.

This paper presents an analogy between SemanticWeb technologies and an existing narrative theory. Narrative generation is presented as an alternative method of human computer interaction, in the form of context based search. The discussions are grounded in domains of Memories for Life, and Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

With the emergence of the Semantic Web, a shared vocabulary is necessary to annotate the vast collection of heterogeneous media already in existence. The OntoMedia ontology aims to provide a meaningful set of relationships which may enable this process, while being suited to mapping and extension. In this paper we outline the salient features of our ontology as well as initial applications and comparisons to existing technologies.

An increase in digital multimedia data, has presented computer scientists with the key problem of large-scale information management. The Semantic Web vision proposes the publishing of information as semanticly accessible resources. Current methods of querying and browsing such rich knowledge bases require an understanding of the domain at hand that can not be asked of end-users. This progress report aims to present how Narratives, that are core to our method of conceptualising our environment, can be used to present targeted knowledge to an end-user. Ontology definitions are promoted as the fundamental building blocks for annotating these multimedia resources and are presented as key to this research. The main contribution of this paper is the identification of the shortcomings of existing narrative generation systems, followed by the identification of techniques that could be adopted to overcome these deficiencies.