The consortium
Audiovisual archiving is a complex and multi-disciplinary domain spanning
such diverse fields as chemistry, physics, signal processing, robotics,
artificial intelligence and semantic interpretation. The challenge
is to integrate partners of all domains representing the variety of competencies
needed. The Project therefore brings together participants including
archive owners, research centres from archive institutions, general
research
centres and universities, industrials, and international non-profit
institutions.
The main organisers and managers of the project are the seven core
partners composing the Steering Board. The core partners are audiovisual
archive
owners, research and integration institutions and academic representatives.
No industrial is present in the core group since the diversity of the
technological solutions addressed by the Project does not allow singling
out a common
representative for the whole domain.
A wide-range of participants constitutes the associated partners. They
may be characterised by the following categories:
- A strong group of Users, Service providers and Industry representatives
will provide the requirements, functional feed-back and the knowledge
on possible existing solutions for particular addressed problems. Users
associated
with the project will provide the first collections for setting-up
the Preservation Factory.
- Industrials and SMEs representing the main actors in the audiovisual,
preservation, restoration, storage and delivery domain are present.
They are eager to address directly the archiving problems, to implement
the
results of research and to build the tools and components for the
preservation chain, for restoration innovations and for access solutions.
- Universities and Applied Research Institutes which will provide
solutions to identified research problems and will work in close
relation to archives
and industrials for the development of solutions.
Out of the 34 partners planned to date, already 32 are identified. Among
them there are:
- 8 archive institutions, most of them representing the archives
as well as their R&D departments,
- 3 applied R&D institutions,
- 15 industrial partners. Practically all of them are SMEs. This
reflects the situation in the market that requires innovative
and flexible solutions.
A few of them are not only offering specialised solutions for specific
areas, but are also service providers and thus potential candidates
with high interest in the later exploitation of the Preservation
Factory services.
One of the industrial partners is a US based company.
Full integration and consistency of the project will be guaranteed
on three levels: first and most prominently by the core partners who
will
participate
in more than one work area or transversal work package. Secondly, also
associated partners will work in more than one work area or work package,
if needed for the project. For instance, the industrial partners will
also contribute to system architecture, user requirements and to exploitation
wherever appropriate. Details on that may be seen from the table on
work distribution to work packages. Thirdly the user requirements will
be
built
on the experience and input of a user group that comprises about 50
institutions of different size with a broad spectrum of experience. Some
of them are
already described in the list of participating institutions.
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