A multimedia system to produce and deliver video fragments on demand on parliamentary websites

Abstract

Parliamentary websites have become one of the most important windows for citizens and media to follow the activities of their legislatures and to hold parliaments to account. Therefore, most parliamentary institutions aim to provide new multimedia solutions capable of displaying video fragments on demand on plenary activities. This paper presents a multimedia system for parliamentary institutions to produce video fragments on demand through a website with linked information and public feedback that helps to explain the content shown in these fragments. A prototype implementation has been developed for the Canary Islands Parliament (Spain) and shows how traditional parliamentary streaming systems can be enhanced by the use of semantics and computer vision for video analytics. The semantic web technologies used make search capabilities on parliamentary websites available to users to retrieve video fragments on demand with accurate and timely information. In addition, video analytic techniques enable the automation of identifying representative keyframes to be annotated by parliamentary experts. As a result, parliaments are able to enhance citizens’ access to information and ensure that these institutions are more open and accountable on their websites and; at the same time, the labor-intensive tasks of parliamentary experts are considerably reduced.