HIIT Media Convergence Automatic Content Management (ACME)	Final report

Research results

Content management includes gathering information from numerous sources,
following several information sources continuously, filtering, combining and
modifying information, creating new material based on or reusing content
fragments and storing and archiving content in databases. 

The goals of this (sub)project was to make a survey of content management
methods and tools. As a result, the following report has been published:

Siru Örström-Koch. Transformations in Content Management (in Finnish). Master's
Thesis. May 2001. 61 pp.

In the report, content management methods have been divided into three
subgroups: format transformations, information gathering and information
assembly. 

1. A format transformation relates to the conversion of data format, not
content. There is a huge amount of such conversion modules, several for each
type of format representation and application. However, there are also attempts
to standardise the formats (e.g., XML) including conversion descriptions
(e.g., XSL).

2. Information gathering includes information extraction, automatic generation
of summaries, information filtering, segmentation and classification, i.e.,
transformations that will discard part of the available information. 

3. Information assembly is usually dependent on format conversions and
information gathering. Before merging information from different sources, it
must usually be converted into the same format, to produce a readable output.  

The subgroups are not distinct, and sometimes a certain content management
process will contain several of these transformation methods. 

The report has clearly shown the need for further research and development. As
a spin-off of the report, a new project has been proposed regarding a
question-answer system for certain application areas. 


Exploitation of research results

The research has been basic research and has the character of a survey and is
in itself not directly exploitable. However, a new project has been proposed
based on the research (see above).


Release and publication of research results

The ongoing research has been presented at the project board meeting on 11
December 2000 and at the Media Convergence seminar on January 25, 2001. A
research report has been written and is available at
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/research/doremi/ACME/ . A new project proposal based on
the research (about building  a question-answer system) has been presented to
several enterprises.


International co-operation

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Implementation of research

The research has been done in the doremi group at the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Helsinki. Several members of the group have taken
part in discussions. The survey report was written by Ms. Siru Örström-Koch as
her Master's Thesis. The report was started on November 1, 2000 and finished on
May 31, 2001 (7 person months). One more person month was used compared with
the research plan.