ECHO

The main objectives of the ECHO (European Chronicles on-Line) 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 project develops and demonstrates an open architecture approach to distributed 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, non-English speech recognizers (Italian, French, Dutch) for the purpose of indexing, searching and retrieval, cross-language retrieval capabilities, intelligent access to digital films, automatic film summary creation, collection mechanisms, privacy and billing mechanisms.