Europe Earmarks $11 Million For Advanced Multimedia Search Platform ResearchEurope Earmarks $11 Million For Advanced Multimedia Search Platform Research

The European Commission is moving to get a jump on developing multimedia technologies by funding a comprehensive research project that will provide an advanced audiovisual search platform.

Announced Thursday, the $11.2 million project will be directed by search technologies developer Fast Search & Transfer, known as FAST. The research effort will involve several European academic organizations as well as several corporations, big and small.

The effort is called the Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces, or Pharos, and is scheduled to cover a 36-month period.

Pharos will lead to "the establishment of a new audiovisual search platform that will allow businesses in various sectors to create compelling, next-generation audiovisual applications," Bjorn Olstad, FAST's CTO, says in an e-mail.

Observing that private and public organizations currently have difficulty in handling the exploding volume of audiovisual material, Olstad says the platform will process and manage the manipulation of all phases of audiovisual material for a wide variety of users.

The platform will seek to prioritize information relevant to the task at hand, he adds; users will even "have the option to interact in a data-driven way to identify the right information even when they are not sure what they are seeking."

The platform will be device agnostic, enabling even mobile users to utilize the technology.

Asked whether the platform would be likely to compete with search engine giant Google, Olstad says he sees no direct competition with Google, although as the Pharos platform develops business-to-consumer and business-to-business applications in the future, there would potentially be some competition with Google.

FAST's partners in Pharos include leading academic institutions from across Europe as well as large corporations like France Telecom, Italy's Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, and some small and medium-sized companies.

"The first thing you need to do in an endeavor like this," says Olstad, "is connect the top academic players in the field in order to have a solid scientific foundation for the research." Universities and other academic research institutions across Europe will participate in the research project.