Thursday, March 15, 2007

OSOTIS ...winning an iPod...and the CeBIT rumble starts again


I have already talked about the video search engine OSOTIS, but it has again improved over the time. First at all, what does 'OSOTIS' mean? No, it's not some sort of ancient egyptian god. It's just derived from the botanical name for 'forget-me-not', which is greek 'Myosotis'. So, the name already gives some hint for the offered service:
(1) OSOTIS offers search within videos
(2) right now, most videos available at OSOTIS are academic lecture recordings, ranging from short viseo sequences from the famous Solvay conference in 1927 (where Einstein replied to Bohr that God does not throw dice...) up to lectures from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, or also my lectures at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena (Germany).
(3) OSOTIS does not host the videos (as youTube or Google does). They only provide links to your resources. Nevertheless, OSOTIS downloads the offered video stream for post processing and for generating timed annotations for the video serch.
(4) You can register at OSOTIS (btw if you register before April 15th you have the chance to win an iPod 30GB) and maintain your own video collections, maintain an own user profile, make friends, choose your favourite videos, and (!) you can tag videos.
(5) You can even tag inside video streams. This means that the tagging information also includes time information and that the search is able to replay the video exactly from the right position.
(6) OSOTIS is a social networking tool.
And OSOTIS is at the CeBIT computer fair that has just opened its gates. Visit us at hall 9, D04!
Yes...and tomorrow I will be at CeBIT in Hannover for the next three days. So just stay tuned, because I will write about everything interesting that comes into my way.