IN2 (UK)

IN2 Search Interfaces Development Limited

Profile of the organisation

IN2 (http://www.in-two.com/) is a best-of-class provider of award-winning solutions and services to interface with multimedia content. IN2 enables clients to tell inspiring multimedia stories around a theme, an event, a location or a brand and supplies advanced rich media indexing tools and creating flexible interfaces that:

  • Facilitate search beyond metadata and descriptions;
  • Allow fast publishing, web 2.0 tagging and expert-level granular annotations;
  • Provide faceted browsing and visualisations of digital collections; and
  • Support simplified navigation of vast digital assets, enabling speedy and smooth user access.

Our tools and services form ON:meedi:a (http://www.onmeedia.com) –  the ecosystem where media lives.  ON:meedi:a is a flexible service-oriented platform where diverse content-based indexing modules can be composed into pipelines and workflows easily customisable to store extracted metadata, annotations and other content into any repository structure. Repository content can be further exploited through ON:meedi:a thanks to its versatile authoring environment that enables new ways of web-publishing.

IN2 recently released mymeedia (http://mymeedia.com/), a cloud-based application for making websites more engaging by empowering them with a virtual stage for displaying all content related to a topic of choice. Own multimedia content is seemingly aggregated alongside social media posts of choice into an interactive interface that looks great on any mobile or desktop device and offers a range of possibilities for searching, browsing and sharing the content found on stage.

IN2 previously released Followtheplace (http://www.followtheplace.com) the social media platform for sharing geo-tagged photos and following locations of interest.

Experience relevant to Europeana Space

IN2 works closely with top universities, actively shaping European funded research in the fields of digital libraries and intelligent content. Currently we develop new interfaces to access (3D) digital content of traditional sports in RePlay project (http://www.fp7-replay.eu/) and in MAXICULTURE (http://www.maxiculture.eu/) we help to maximise the impact of FP7 ICT research on access to cultural heritage. Furthermore we recently started to investigate how geo-tagged social media can be used in emergency situations (http://super-fp7.eu/), and how to bridge the gap between the market and research in semantic digital libraries (FP7 StoM).

Previously, IN2 lead the IM3I+ demonstration project (FP7) which brought multimedia research into practice. We also carried out two experiments over Future Internet facilities: one in the BonFIRE project where we explored the effects of multi‐cloud infrastructures for the delivery of management and publishing services to the creative industry; and one in the EXPERIMEDIA project, where we developed tools for place‐centric media collections incorporating destination management content, tweets, Facebook posts, Flickr photos, and local business content for tourists and citizens of the region of Schladming, Austria. We have previously worked on a) a flexible framework for multimedia management and publishing, b) semantic annotation of web content using linked data, c) semantic recommendation engines, and d) aggregating archives of media art and building a one‐stop destination for accessing this thematic content (http://www.gama‐gateway.eu/).

IN2 is a Steering Board member of the New European Media (NEM) European Technology Platform that aims to drive the future of digital experience and to this end publishes a number of technology position papers that help guide policy makers.

Role in the project

IN2 plays a driving role in the Dance pilot, customising and adapting its technology, namely ON:meedi:a and mymeedia, in order to support the needs of the general public, dance enthusiasts and pre-professionals (e.g. dance learners and educators, those who participate in dance as a social and/or recreational activity, dance audiences/viewers and tourists, etc.) who want to share and explore content about a particular dance aspect.

Key Personnel

Dr. George Ioannidis, IN2’s Director, holds a Master of Science (MSEE) and a doctoral degree (PhD) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the National Technical University of Athens. He also holds an MBA where the main focus was on innovation management. After positions in academia including as head of the image and video analysis group at the Center for Computing Technologies in Bremen, he founded IN2 in 2005. He has initiated, participated and managed several European research projects since 1993 in the area of multimedia content management and accessibility. He acts frequently as a programme committee member in international conferences and workshops (e.g. ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval, International Conference on Pattern Recognition) and serves regularly as a reviewer of business plan competitions, and as an evaluator and reviewer of national, European and international collaborative research projects.