Virtual Campfire

Introduction

The Web 2.0 communities become mobile and multimedia based, which raises new challenges to community information systems. Meanwhile, Social Software makes users be content prosumers (consumer and producer in parallel) anywhere at any time. Consequently, Web 2.0 and social software result in a great amount of multimedia artifacts and a large number of diverse communities. Within the research cluster UMIC of the German Excellence Initiative, we have developed this scenario. Virtual Campfire is an advanced framework to create, search, and share multimedia artifacts with context awareness cross communities. Hosted on the basic component the Community Engine, Virtual Campfire provides communities  a set of Context-Aware Services and Multimedia Processor Components (cf. Figure 1) to connect to heterogeneous data sources. Through standard protocols a large variety of (mobile) interfaces facilitate a rapid design and prototyping of context-aware multimedia community information systems. The successful realization of a couple of (mobile) applications listed as follows has proved the concept and demonstrated Virtual Campfire in practices.

 

• YouTell is a multimedia based non-linear digital storytelling system with the underlying Movement Oriented Design (MOD) paradigm (developed at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia). It contextualizes multimedia artifacts with regard to multimedia semantics and problems addressed by users. Please have a try by clicking here.
  
• NMV is an MPEG-7 multimedia tagging system. It support free text tagging, MPEG-7 standard based semantic tagging and community based tagging (Commsonomy) to enhance semantic multimedia search and retrieval.
• Mobile Campfire is an iPhone application for multimedia creation tagging and story sharing. Spatiotemporal context information is  captured at real-time photo creation process. Stories composed of images and videos in the SMIL format are able to be shared by iPhone users. Mobile Campfire can be downloaded and installed from AppStore (Mobile Campfire at iTunes AppStore).
• SeViAnno is a semantic-enhanced video annotation service to enable collaborative tagging of video frames. Expressiveness of video semantics is enhanced through tagging on objects, agents, concepts, events, time, and places based on MPEG-7. The user interface is simple and comprehensive using Web 2.0 and mashups. Please have a try by clicking here.    
  
• ACIS is a GIS enabled multimedia information system hosting diverse user communities. Cultural heritage management in Afghanistan has its special case, because the national scientific structures and information systems were ever destroyed. ACIS facilitates the intergenerational cooperation among communities on an international level. Please have a try by clicking here.
  

All these applications employ the community engine and MPEG-7 Services within the Virtual Campfire framework. Other services and (mobile) interfaces are applied according to different communities' requirements. The main applying domains are in the moment cultural science, cultural heritage management (in cooperation with Department of Urban History at RWTH Aachen) and technology-enhanced learning. Together with the research progress at Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems (Informatik 4), Virtual Campfire running on Wireless Mesh Networks will be able to applied with high and stable network data transfer capability and low cost in developing countries.

 

Trailer

• Virtual Campfire - A Social Software to Heat up Your Old Bones!

Posters

• UMIC Day 2006
• UMIC Day 2007
• UMIC Day 2008
• UMIC Day 2009
  

Publications

2012

• Yiwei Cao

  Uncertainty Handling in Mobile Community Information Systems

  Published in PhD Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, 2012

2011

• Xiangfeng Luo, Yiwei Cao, Bo Yang, Jianxun Liu, Feiyue Ye

  New Horizons in Web-Based Learning - ICWL 2010 Workshops: STEG, CICW, WGLBWS, and IWKDEWL

  Published in Revised Selected Papers, Shanghai, China, December 7-11, 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer, Vol. 6537, 2011, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20539-2

• Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke

  The Hero's Journey - Template-Based Storytelling for Ubiquitous Multimedia Management

  Published in Special Issue on Journal of Multimedia (JMM): Advances in Interactive Media Technologies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2011, pp. 156-169, Academy Publisher.

• Dejan Kovachev, Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke

  Learn-as-you-go: New Ways of Cloud-based Micro-learning for the Mobile Web

  Published in Advances in Web-Based Learning - ICWL 2011, Proceedings of 10th International Conference, Hong Kong, December 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 7048, pp. 51-61, Springer Verlag

• Georgios Toubekis, Irmengard Mayer, Marina Döring-Williams, Kosaku Maeda, Kazuya Yamauchi, Yoko Taniguchi, Susumu Morimoto, Michael Petzet, Matthias Jarke, Michael Jansen

  Preservation and Management of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bamiyan: Laser Scan Documentation and Virtual reconstruction of the Destroyed Buddha Figures and the Archaeological Remains

  Published in CIPA Heritage Documentation Best Practices and Applications, Series I, 2007 2009 2011, Eds. Stylianidis E., Patias, P. and Santana,M., International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol. XXXVIII,Part 5/C19

2010

• Yiwei Cao, Dominik Renzel, Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma, Michael Lottko, Georgios Toubekis, Michael Jansen

  Well-balanced Usability & Annotation Complexity in Interactive Video Semantization

  Published in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering (MUE 2010)

• Dominik Renzel, Yiwei Cao, Michael Lottko, Ralf Klamma

  Collaborative Video Annotation for Multimedia Sharing between Experts and Amateurs

  Published in Anna Carreras, Jaime Delgado, Xavier Maroñas, Víctor Rodríguez (Eds.): Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community on Interoperable Social Multimedia Applications (WISMA-2010), CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-583 Barcelona, Spain, May 19-20, 2010, 7-14.

• Haroula Papadaki, Eleni Gadolou, Emmanuel Stefanakis, Georgios Kritikos, Yiwei Cao, Anna Hannemann, Dejan Kovachev, Ralf Klamma

  The role of CMS in the education of GIS using storytelling

  Published in Seventh European GIS Education Seminar (EUGISES 2010), September 9 - 12, 2010, Serres Greece.

• Eleni Gadolou, Haroula Papadaki, Emmanuel Stefanakis, Georgios Kritikos, Yiwei Cao, Anna Hannemann, Ralf Klamma, Dejan Kovachev

  Storytelling, Spatial Standards and Cultural Heritage Management

  Published in (short paper), Marco Painho, Maribel Yasmina Santos and Hardy Pundt (eds.): Proceedings of 13th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science: Geospatial Thinking, Guimaraes, Portugal, May 10-14, 2010

• Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke

  Mobile multimedia management for Virtual Campfire - the German excellence research cluster UMIC

  Published in International Journal on Computer Systems, Science and Engineering (IJCSSE), 25(3): 251-265, May 2010.

• Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Martin Hristov

  The Hero's Journey - A Storytelling Template Engine for Ubiquitous Multimedia

  Published in Klamma, R. et al. (eds.): 3rd IEEE International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing (U-Media), July 5-7, 2010, Jinhua, China, pp.118-123, IEEE Press.

• Yiwei Cao, Anna Hannemann, Ralf Klamma, Dejan Kovachev, Dominik Renzel

  Mobile Multimedia Management for Community-aware Storytelling

  Published in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'10), May 23-26, 2010, Kansas City, MO, USA. pp. 59-64

2009

• Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma, Dejan Kovachev

  Multimedia Processing on Multimedia Semantics and Multimedia Context

  Published in Ralf Klamma, Harald Kosch, Matthias Lux and Florian Stegmaier (Eds.): Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe'09), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 539, Graz, Austria, December, 2009

• Dominik Renzel, Ralf Klamma, Yiwei Cao, Dejan Kovachev

  Virtual Campfire - Collaborative Multimedia Semantization with Mobile Social Software

  Published in Ralf Klamma, Harald Kosch, Matthias Lux and Florian Stegmaier (Eds.): Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe'09), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 539, Graz, Austria, December, 2009

• Dejan Kovachev, Ralf Klamma

  Context-aware Mobile Multimedia Services in the Cloud

  Published in Ralf Klamma, Harald Kosch, Matthias Lux and Florian Stegmaier (Eds.): Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe'09), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 539, Graz, Austria, December, 2009

• Ralf Klamma, Georgios Toubekis, Yiwei Cao, Dominik Renzel, Matthias Jarke, Michael Jansen

  Virtual Campfire - Cultural Heritage Management and Presentation on Mobile Devices based on Interoperable Cross-Plattform MPEG-7 Multimedia Web Services

  Published in Conference Paper at the 22nd CIPA Symposium - Digital Documentation, Interpretation & Presentation of Cultural Heritage, 11-15 Octoer 2009, Kyoto, Japan

• Yiwei Cao, Anna Hannemann, Ralf Klamma, Dominik Renzel

  A Community Success Model for Gaming Communities

  Published in Journal of Multimedia, Vol 4, No 2 (2009), 87-93, Apr 2009, ACADEMY PUBLISHER, doi:10.4304/jmm.4.2.87-93

• Ralf Klamma, Yiwei Cao, Matthias Jarke

  Storytelling on the Web 2.0 as a New Means of Creating Arts

  Published in Borko Furht (Eds.): Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts, Springer, pp. 623-650, 2009

2008

• Ralf Klamma, N. Sharda, Balthasar Fernández-Manjón, Harald Kosch, Marc Spaniol

  Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08) at EC-TEL 08, Sep. 16, 2008, Maastricht, the Netherlands