• Pandia , Wednesday, October 31, 2007 12 PM

Under the umbrella of the CHORUS project (a consortium for companies and research institutions seeking to develop new communications and info technology), a French team has been working on plans for a multimedia search engine called Quaero.

Led by search technologists Pieter van der Linden and Henri Gouraurd, the team behind Quaero has set to develop technology that can find, manipulate and process multilingual multimedia content -- and better allow its users to do things with said content.

Van der Linden and Gourard recently gave a presentation on the progress of Quaero, outlining the 6 application-specific areas that were being worked on. Technologists from both private and public sector entities like Exalead, Bertin Technologies and Karlsruche University were tackling the tasks of content security (like A/V fingerprinting), automated aggregation and tagging of meta-data, classic search and extraction, as well as crafting both the user interface and building the actual infrastructure behind such large volumes of data storage.

Whether Quaero actually pans out into a search engine remains to be seen, but it's clear that the EU entities are making heavy investments (both in time and budgets) for innovation in the space.

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