The CHORUS Gap Analysis on User-centered Methodology for Design and Evaluation of Multi-media Information Access Systems

CHORUS is a Coordination Action, a specific type of project funded by the European commission under its research programmes, intended to bring together research projects with common goals, in the field of search technologies for digital audio-visual content, one of the strategic objectives of the current research frame program. CHORUS coordinates a number of research projects in the general area of audio-visual and multi-media information access and management. The most important single contribution of the CHORUS work plan will be to provide a survey of the field and a roadmap with a gap analysis for the realisation of viable audio-visual search engines by European partners. This is done by several means. CHORUS organises Think-Tanks with industrial participation, focussed workshops to treat specific questions, and more general conferences for academic discussions. CHORUS is now in its final phase, and is currently preparing its final report together with a final conference to mark its publication. As part of this work CHORUS will establish a reference functional description of multimedia search engines. A technology view of the functional description is given in Figure 1. This functional description will be related to use cases and scenarios gathered from interviews with active research projects and industrial activities.