ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Social Tagging of Video Files

In 2008 the University of Queensland will begin video recording selected course lectures and making these videos available on course websites for students. This will allow students to easily revise lecture material for exams and allow them to listen and think during lecture attendance rather than concentrating on scribbling notes.

The current method of browsing these online lecture recordings is somewhat cumbersome. Searching through recordings to find relevant information can prove both time and bandwidth consuming. This thesis project proposes that a social tagging system would be an ideal method of categorising UQ's lecture videos, and demonstrates this in the form of a working prototype.

Social tagging is a method of content categorisation present in many social networking websites, which allows users to attach keywords to resources. These keywords are used to aid the searching and filtering of content.

. The prototype tagging system supports all the operations one would expect. Users of the system may attach keywords to videos to allow the filtering of video content. Additionally users may tag specific sections of video, in effect bookmarking it and allowing others to skip straight to that spot. The prototype web system uses Apache web server with MySQL, and a combination of PHP and Javascript for dynamic page content.