We present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the mu- seum of Onna (L'Aquila, Italy). The Onna Onlus and the citizens of Onna have the ambitious project to rebuild the town affected by the earthquake of April 2009 and to create a museum in memory of Onna. In addition to the tradi- tional fruition tools for museums, we have been asked for an interactive system capable to communicate the past events and the efforts invested. We are working on a multi-modal system composed of an indoor environment in which visitors can interact with a natural interface system and an outdoor module based on a cross-platform mobile application. A pro- filing method is also exploited in order to extract a profile of interest of each visitor and then use it to suggest in-depth personalized and geo-located information about the disaster and the local history via multimedia contents.

In this paper we present a work-in-progress interactive exhibit for the museum of Onna, a little town near to L'Aquila (Italy), almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of April 2009. The installation will be developed as an environment in which visitors of the museum can interact with a natural interaction system and then discover the history of the disaster via rich multimedia contents. Visitors are detected through the adoption of an RFID-based technology, which allows to store their interaction history and build an interest profile used to enrich the experience. Different scenarios have been implemented and tested in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

One of the most interesting issues in the field of cultural heritage is the adoption of multimedia systems for the visualization and organization of information. In this paper we present a natural interaction based system designed to represent multimedia contents related to the archaeological site of Shawbak, situated in the Petra region of Jordan. Contents are composed of texts, images and videos showing and explaining the archeological site areas and the history of the castle. This system was installed at the Limonaia di Palazzo Pitti (Italy) for the archeological exhibition called "From Petra to Shawbak".

In this technical demonstration we show an integrated web system for video search and annotation based on ontologies. The system is composed by three components: the Orione ontology-based search engine, the Sirio\footnote{Sirio was the hound of Orione. It was a dog so swift that no prey could escape it.} search interface, and the Pan web-based video annotation tool. The system is currently being developed within the EU IM3I project. The goal of the system is to provide an integrated environment for video annotation and retrieval of videos, for both technical and non-technical users. In fact, the search engine has different interfaces that permit different query modalities: free-text, natural language, graphical composition of concepts using Boolean and temporal relations and query by visual example. In addition, the ontology structure is exploited to encode semantic relations between concepts permitting, for example, to expand queries to synonyms and concept specializations. The annotation tool can be used to create ground-truth annotations to train automatic annotations systems, or to complement the results of automatic annotation, e.g. adding geolocalized information.

In this technical demonstration we present a novel web-based tool that allows a user friendly semantic browsing of video collections, based on ontologies, concepts, concept relations and concept clouds. The system is developed as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) to achieve a fast responsiveness and ease of use that can not be obtained by other web application paradigms, and uses streaming to access and inspect the videos. Users can also use the tool to browse the content of social and media sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, accessing these external resources through the ontologies used in the system. The tool has won the second prize in the Adobe YouGC contest, in the RIA category.

This paper addresses the design and development of MediaPick [1], an interactive multi-touch system for semantic search of multimedia contents. Our solution provides an intuitive, easy-to-use way to select concepts organized according to an ontological structure and retrieve the related contents. Users are then able to examine and organize such results through semantic or subjective criteria. As use case we considered professionals who work with huge multimedia archives (journalists, archivists, editors etc.).

In this technical demonstration we show the current version of Arneb, a web-based system for manual annotation of videos, developed within the EU VidiVideo project. This tool has been developed with the aim of creating ground truth annotations, that can be used for training and evaluating automatic video annotation systems. Annotations can be exported to MPEG-7 and OWL ontologies. The system has been developed according to the Rich Internet Application paradigm, allowing collaborative web-based annotation.

In this technical demonstration we show a web video search engine based on ontologies, the Sirio system, that has been developed within the EU VidiVideo project. The goal of the system is to provide a search engine for videos for both technical and non-technical users. In fact, the system has different interfaces that permit different query modalities: free-text, natural language, graphical composition of concepts using boolean and temporal relations and query by visual example. In addition, the ontology structure is exploited to encode semantic relations between concepts permitting, for example, to expand queries to synonyms and concept specializations.

Along with images and videos, 3D models have recently gained increasing attention for a number of reasons: advancements in 3D hardware and software technologies; their ever decreasing prices and increasing availability; affordable 3D authoring tools; the establishment of open standards for 3D data interchange. The ever increasing availability of 3D models demands tools to support their effective and efficient management. Among these tools, those enabling content-based retrieval play a key role. We present a novel approach to 3D content-based retrieval that is based on spin images. Spin images are used to derive a view-independent description of both database and query objects: a set of spin images is first created for each object; then, a descriptor is evaluated for each spin image in the set; clustering is performed on the set of image-based descriptors of each object to achieve a compact representation of the object, thus allowing for efficient indexing and matching. Experimental results are presented for a test database of about 300 models. These results indicate that spin images can be successfully exploited for content-based retrieval of 3D objects

Shape representations for classification or retrieval purposes, have been extensively investigated, but only a few methods have tried to represent shapes as extended entities without reducing them to their boundary profiles or to synthetic geometric descriptors. An original solution for shape representation is proposed; it relies on a modelling technique originally developed to express directional spatial relationships between extended spatial entities. The representation selects a discrete set of points with respect to which a relationship matrix is computed, accounting for the spatial distribution of shape pixels. This is accomplished at different levels of resolution by a tree based structural representation. Properties of the representation and a measure of shape similarity are discussed. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solution have also been assessed in the context of content based retrieval applications, through an experimental evaluation using a shape collection.