Digital Video and Hypermedia Based New Services for Working on Patrimonial Archives

The "Institut National de l'Audiovisuel" (INA) is in charge of keeping records of national TV broadcasts. Its main function is to provide TV producers with authentic sources. It also serves as a patrimonial archive library for researchers such as historians, sociologists, who study historical facts. The Opales Project is a test bed for studying new services empowered by digital video and hypermedia technology. Opales is a private portal, which enables its users to directly work on archive documents in private workspaces, to share elicited knowledge about studied documents, and to collaborate anonymously as well as within groups. The paper focuses on some of the provided services and on their consequences on a patrimonial archive access:

• Community management service supporting virtual groups of users who declare to share "points of view" about documents. Supporting knowledge exchange (import / export) about documents between virtual groups is the key feature of the system. Video information retrieval services improved by incrementally sharing user's private indexing of documents, for instance one may import the "points of view" of some expert's virtual group for a more precise search. A shared ontology is dynamically extendible according to selected points of view.
• High precision indexing empowered by using conceptual graphs. Representing the elicted knowledge in the annotations in a computable format makes inferences possible on annotations elaborated anonymously by independent users.

The new services supported by Opales aim at homing into the portal the results of users work. The direct consequence is a value added to the archives to which elicited knowledge is bound as user points of view.