SBIR Phase I: From Annotations to Adaptations

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research project is focused on inventing new tools and standards for exposing and enhancing the structure of media to make its full learning and creative potential accessible to all. The rapid growth in creation and availability of digital video presents both an unprecedented opportunity and challenge. Without parallel growth in structural information about the richest formats in which ideas are expressed and communicated, we are headed for a crisis in accessibility at two levels: 1) knowledge is shared in formats that are increasingly inaccessible to the disabled; 2) much of the knowledge in visual forms is not easily indexable and therefore difficult to access and manipulate, even by those unencumbered by disabilities. If this trend continues, and evidence points in this direction, most of the web will be as accessible as a microfiche archive: a wealth of data with only high level descriptions. The objectives of this research project is to integrate the prototypes into a video type of 'wiki', i.e. a suite of web applications for collaborative markup - with descriptive metadata, including real-time data-streams, and remixing -- by manipulating metadata, of video content with great educational potential. The ability to only view excellent videos of lectures, documentaries, interviews, etc. presents an impoverished notion of access to the wealth of information in these videos. Several organizations have solved the ground level access problem by making their content available online. The value of their offerings cannot be underestimated, but it is critical to move beyond mere time- and place-shifted access to address the deeper accessibility divide: a lack of access to tools for viewing, understanding, and manipulating the structure of media. Exposed structures make possible new ways of 'viewing' (as closed-captioning has demonstrated) and also enable new ways to re-cut the media fabric (with the tools developed) into new meaningful representations. Specifically, demonstrations of the commercial viability of services for adding value to corpuses of video are presented in two ways: by providing tools and services for ensuring universal accessibility and by developing educational material for advanced placement (AP) math, science, and engineering courses.