The Development of an audio-visual aggregator: the Open Audio-Visual Archives (OAVA) project in Greece

Abstract

The available online audiovisual material maintained by public and private organizations and institutions is numerous and ranges from videos and narrations regarding historical and everyday life events to scientific, academic, and cultural events. Despite the apparent availability of audiovisual resources, finding useful resources is not as easy as one might think. Poor indexing by search engines and lack of metadata schemes are the main reasons for this inconvenience. The problem of dispersion of audiovisual resources and diversity of resource providers is largely solved by aggregation services. In Greece there is no reference point for the search and access to audiovisual material. A Greek National Registry of audiovisual providers has not yet been implemented. The Open Audio-Visual Archives (OAVA) project aims to gather audiovisual material that is of Greek interest or contains Greek speech. The OAVA project provides a unified search mechanism not only to the aggregate metadata of audio-visual material but also to its searchable content. Through the application of deep learning models, algorithms are developed that perform Automatic Speech Recognition in Greek and in English. During the project, 500 Greek-language audiovisual content providers were reviewed. 233 of them were found eligible according to specific criteria. The metadata used by each provider were mainly application schemes without metadata schemes. Those were recorded and mapped with Vufind and with EBUCore schema. The open-source software VuFind was configured to operate as the basis of the unified search platform. This article briefly presents the objectives of the project, selection criteria, results for content and audiovisual providers in Greece. It overviews licensing issues, the OAVA metadata scheme and the basic functions of the search mechanism.