A subset of Experiential Systems Lab at UCI (Disclosure: I am leading this group) that is commonly called EMME (Experiential Media Management Environment) has put together a system that is a first step in organizing and access of media — currently focused on personal media. In the first step it takes photos from my disk and organizes them (more or less automatically — using the folder names that the user assigned) in event tree and then one can search and navigate these photos using a steering wheel like control structure for navigation. Currently it does have multiple ‘boxes’ including for time, location, and tags, but as we go forward our focus is to minimize use of ‘keyword boxes’ and encourage people to use only steering approach. This system is also likely to provide powerful environment for storytelling using multimedia data.
I am very pleased that the first steps have been taken. Real hardwork by Arjun Satish, Mingyan Gao, Pinaki Sinha, and YeSun Joung resulted in putting together this system. I did describe this in my talk last week at MIR at ICIP2008 held in San Diego — available from my home page www.ics.uci.edu/~jain under Presentations.
It has been very exciting to see this system start working. I see this evolve into a very powerful approach for organizing experiences around events and accessing them easily.