1 Domain specific scenarios
1.1 Introduction
In the previous section, we have described the advantages of CONVERGENCE
without reference to any specific organization or business scenario. In this Chapter,
we describe four scenarios showing how CONVERGENCE could be used in the four
markets in which the CONVERGENCE partners have specific experience –stock
photography (Alinari), non-profit organizations generating and distributing video
materials for research and education (FMSH), distance education (LMU) and retailing
(Wipro/UTI). For each market we will describe
:
o The partner presenting the scenario, and the experience it contributes to the
analysis
o The main characteristics of the market
o Currently available solutions
o Possible CONVERGENCE-based products and services, and their advantages
over existing solutions
o Relevant implementation and deployment issues,
o Possible business models
o A SWOT analysis
1.2 Stock Photography - Alinari
1.2.1 Alinari
Alinari - part of the SOLE-24 Ore Group – owns an archive of over 5.5 million
original photographs - prints, glass plates, films, etc.- which represent a major
resource for scholars of Italian and European history, art, society and culture. The
company’s core business is the sale of rights to use these photographs, which it has
recently begun to commercialize online (http://www.alinari.it/en/e-commerce.asp).
Non-commercial users can access the archive at www.alinariarchives.it or through the
company’s educational websites (www.edotto.it ; http://edu.alinari.it). Alinari is also
a world leader in photographic publishing and is the only publishing house in the
world that still uses the traditional collotype printing process. The company regularly
organizes exhibitions of works taken from its archives and manages a major Museum
of Photography (www.mnaf.it).
As a stock photography agency, Alinari serves a professional market, in which it has
four main lines of business, typical of other organizations working in the same sector
1. Selling photographs for use in commercial publications
2. Representing and providing services third party archives (e.g. photographic
archives maintained by museums)
3. Acting as a representative for professional freelance photographers
4. Providing photos to teachers and researchers
5. Providing merchandise to the consumer market
The company has recently analyzed ways in which CONVERGENCE could
contribute to these businesses. The results are relevant not just to Alinari but also to
other small-medium Stock Photography companies. In what follows, we summarize
key results of the analysis.
1.2.2 Market analysis
1.2.2.1 The stock photography market
In the mid 1990s, the market for stock photography was dominated by small players.
At that time, the largest image providers were news services such as AP, UPI and
AFP that supplied images to newspapers and other editorial end-users on subscription.
The largest stock image provider probably had revenues of about $50 million per
year, ninety per cent of which were derived from sales to corporate and creative
clients for conceptually oriented images. No single company had more than a five or
ten per cent share of the total market. Total revenue in the industry probably did not
amount to more than $1 billion per year.
Since the 1990s, however, the stock image market has undergone a process of rapid
consolidation. Today 20-40% of the market is dominated by a small number of major
players (Getty, Corbis, iStockphoto –owned by Getty-, Dreamstime, Superstock,
123RF, Fotolia) many of which are the results of results of mergers between preexisting stock agencies such as the Bettmann Archive, Liaison, and Digital Stock.
European companies represent about 40% of the market. These include Top Photo,
Bridgeman, AISA, and about 60 other companies, among which Alinari. Most of the
remaining market consists of emerging Asian and Latin-America companies.
1.2.2.2 The digital photography revolution
One of the most important factors that has transformed the market is the digital
photography revolution. In 2007, the value of the overall world market for digital
photography was estimated at $131.4 billion. It is projected that by 2013 it will reach
$222.2 billion with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.3%. In 2007, sales
of digital photography products (cameras, accessories etc.) generated $91.0 billion
and are expected to grow to $130.6 billion by 2013, with a CAGR of 5.2%. However,
the fastest growing segment of the market is Digital photography applications, which
is expected to grow from $40.3 billion in 2007 to $91.5 billion in 2013, with a CAGR
of 13.3%.
The rise of digital photography has gone hand in hand with the decline of the market
for traditional film. The recent bankruptcy filing by Eastman Kodak 1 marks the end of
an epoch. Already today, most of the photo labs that used to process film and make
prints have gone out of business. Meanwhile the availability of millions of advanced
digital cameras has created a rapidly expanding market for services photographers can
use to upload, share and email their photos. When Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 it
paid $30 million. When MySpace acquired Photobucket in 2007 it paid $250 million.
In 2008, Getty’s purchase of Jupiter – the owner of StockXpert - cost $96 million.
The next big trend is expected to be the rise of the smart-phone, which is already
beginning to capture some of the demand for more traditional digital cameras.
1.2.2.3 Internet and intellectual property
Since the consolidation of the stock photography market, the digital photography
revolution and the Internet explosion, perhaps the most important factor that has
shaped the market for photography, the visual arts and design is providers’ need to
protect their intellectual property. The way the Internet operates and the nature of
Internet technology conflicts with this need –forcing providers to adopt sub-optimal
solutions and creating opportunities for alternative solutions, such as
CONVERGENCE.
Internet as a global market. Current copyright law is organized on a national basis.
De facto, however, the Internet, has no territorial limits. Thus a Swedish user,
governed by Swedish law, can upload content to a server located in the US or
Singapore from where an user in Russia can download it and use it wherever she
1
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/eastman-kodak-sues-apple-over-four-and.html
pleases, perhaps locally, perhaps for a web site in South Africa. Individuals are
subject to a single national legislation; the content they create/duplicate/share is not.
The USA is currently engaged in an effort to stop the infringement of US copyright
by non-US web sites. However the legislation currently under discussion in congress
(SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act; PIPA - Protect Intellectual Property Act) is highly
controversial, is opposed by large organizations, such as Google, Facebook,
Wikipedia and Microsoft 2 , and no longer has the
support of President Obama. It thus appears the
current status quo will continue for some time to
come. The effects are serious. Some estimates claim
that in 2011the value of Intellectual Property lost to
piracy amounted to as much as 58 billion dollars3
Responsibility for uploaded and shared materials:
In the current Internet, users are free to
upload/download/share content on web sites,
community sites, blogs and other sites (even small
commercial web sites, etc). Although service providers will usually obey take-down
notices, they do not usually check who owns the copyright to uploaded material, and
do not accept legal liability for the material they host. (see [4] and [2]).
Business and loss of business. In today’s Internet, big players (e.g. search or file
sharing services) maximize their advertising revenues by attracting as many
visitors/subscribers as possible. One way is to provide free access to copyrighted
content. The result is an enormous loss for legal right holders (authors, publishers,
distributors etc).
Consider the example shown in Figure 1. In the setting shown, which is very
common, the rights owner receives absolutely no compensation. In theory, the owner
could ask for compensation from the user. However, current Internet technology gives
him no way of monitoring how his works are used. The result is a drop in margins for
creators and agencies, which are compelled to increase their sales volumes to stay in
the market or to restrict themselves to niche markets where barriers to competition
allows them remain competitive.
2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
Source: Il Corriere della Sera, 18-01-2012, page 37 (‘America, la serrata di Wikipedia’ by Massimo
Gaggi)
3
Photo Author: cliff1066™
Copyright: Norman Rockwell/Flickr
Corriere della Sera 14-11-2011
Figure 1: Flickr is a picture-sharing platform which has started in 2011 commercial licensing of
user’s pictures. Who is the real person behind ‘cliff1066’? Who will inherit his/her rights? Is Flickr
becoming a b2b archive after it has collected user’s creative pictures?
Invisibility of valuable resources/ loss of revenues for content providers. Imagine
that a user, living in Italy needs a Picasso picture to use in a brochure. In Italy, the
rights to images of such pictures are managed by foundations (Picasso Foundation)
and agencies (Alinari in Italy represents some of the Picasso’s image rights). Such
organizations are responsible to the authors and other right owners for any misuse of
the images they manage. As a result, they cannot allow search engines to crawl their
collections, which are only accessible through their own proprietary portals. In brief,
the lack of adequate technology to protect rights and trace the use of copyrighted
material makes it difficult for legitimate users to find the images they need and
reduces the revenues they might other otherwise generate for providers.
Cost of finding rights owners before using a picture. Current Internet technology
provides no way of identifying holders of rights to images distributed over the
network. Given that rights holders often include not just the author and publisher of
the image but also the brands and people it depicts, identifying rights holders is a far
more complex task than commonly realized – so expensive, in fact, that the cost of
finding out who owns the rights to an image may be higher than its value. Agencies
such as Alinari have a highly professional approach to this problem. However, this
weakens their competitive position with respect to other organizations that take less
care or to search engines, which make no attempt to identify rights holders.
An example: a large European city recently asked Alinari to post-process a set of
pictures that the municipality claimed to own entirely. Before fulfilling the order,
Alinari, explored the Web and found matching images belonging to anonymous
photographers. The city (a public administration!) then admitted it had not checked
who held the rights to the photos. The photographers were grateful when Alinari
requested their authorization before modifying and using the images. This is a story
with a happy ending. However, it also shows the amount of work and the costs
involved in identifying rights holders.
Orphan works: Users of online platforms typically register with nicknames and do
not provide their addresses (see Figure 1). Very often these same users later forget
their credentials, or stop using the platform. If they die, their children and legal
relatives find it very difficult to claim ownership of or even to identify the works they
have published. At the same time, commercial organizations are unable to use them
because they cannot identify the rights holders.
The special position of the stock photo market: Many TV broadcasters see the
Internet as beneficial (e.g. when YouTube or Facebook attract users to a program 4)
and sometimes as a source of revenue (e.g. when YouTube pays them for user visits
to copyrighted material). By contrast, providers of images cannot monetize references
to their work: it is unlikely that a user will purchase an image because she has seen in
discussed on Facebook. There is also a risk that web-based services could cannibalize
their business – as when Ghetty sells images from Flickr.
1.2.2.4 Consumers become producers
Digital photography and the Internet revolutions have transformed consumers into
producers of images. Traditionally consumers took pictures for fun and for sharing,
using non-professional cameras. In the majority of cases, they did not post-process or
annotate their work (no retouching, no sharpening no cropping, straightening or color
correction) and shared it only with friends on their personal social networks. In recent
years, however, an increasing number of consumers have begun to use prosumer
equipment, to produce pictures of semi-professional quality and to try to monetize
their work. Sites like lulu.com, ilmiolibro.it, blurb.com show that there can be a
significant market for these works, and that this long right tail5 of the market can eat
into the market of traditional stock photo agencies.
1.2.3 Analysis of currently available solutions
At the time of writing, stock photo agencies rely manage and deliver their services
almost exclusively through proprietary platforms, through which they defend their
brand identity. Small to medium sized agencies such as Alinari find it increasingly
difficult to build, manage and maintain systems capable of competing with the major
players. At the same time, services such as Flickr, originally designed for the
consumer market, are becoming increasingly important as a distribution channel for
4
Personal communication. Andrea Portante (Director Marketing & Business Development at RAI New
Media, RAI)
5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
professional and semi-professional photographers and as a source of low-cost
photographic material by news and other organizations.
Weaknesses of current solutions

Building a proprietary platform requires specialist know-how (e.g. on
licensing and Digital Rights Management, on effective use of standards, on
use of semantic technology), which is rarely available to small and medium
organizations

Proprietary platforms need to be continuously updated to support new
technologies (e.g. mobile phone operating systems), new regulatory
requirements (e.g. on user privacy), ever-changing user expectations (e.g. for
usability) and ever-evolving threats to privacy and security. This creates very
heavy costs for the agencies operating the platform

Given user reliance on search engines to find services, low-ranking platforms
from small players are invisible to many potential users and customers

In the absence of agreed standards for metadata, customers are often unable to
find the photographs agencies would like to sell them. This problem is
particularly serious for small-medium agencies, whose platforms are not well
known

Annotation of images is still haphazard, making it difficult for professional
users to find the photographs they need

Proprietary systems fail to bind images to licensing and ownership
information, making it hard to enforce licensing conditions and creating the
problem of “orphan works”

Proprietary systems offer no way of tracing how an image is used once a user
has downloaded an image file

Web-based platforms require sufficient bandwidth and storage capacity to
handle irregular peaks in demand. This makes for extremely inefficient use of
resources
1.2.4 Market needs, products and services
1.2.4.1 Professional stock photography – a potential market for
CONVERGENCE services
The analysis summarized in the previous sections, suggests that there exists a specific
market professional market for professional stock photography, distinct from services
the market for semi-professional photographers and non-commercial consumers of
photography. This market includes professional photographers, professional users of
photographs and other actors such as collecting societies 6 that participate in the
professional photography ecosystem. Figure 2 provides a general picture of the value
chain for the market
Generalised Photo Value Chain
advertising
news
media- or
advertising
agency
photographer
stock photo
agency
archive
archive
archive
photographer
stock photo
or news
agency
publisher
publisher
Figure 2: photo value chain (IPTC 2007 white paper).
Figure 3 shows some of key actors. Figure 4 shows the same market divided by
segment. Readers will note that this it has very different characteristics from the
market for non-professional photography. Professional photographers and
professional users of photography spend more than their non-professional
counterparts. And unlike non-professionals, they are interested in the value it is
possible to add to photo..
Figure 3: simplified model of stakeholders.
6
Collecting societies are organizations created by copyright law or private agreement for the purpose
of engaging in collective rights management. Examples include the SIAE in Italy, the CCC in the USA
and Canada, and 30-40 other organizations elsewhere in the world
Figure 4: simplified visual imaging market model
1.2.4.2 Options for new services
The analysis presented in the previous sections suggests many opportunities for the
introduction of CONVERGENCE-based services
A) Services for process optimization inside stock photography agencies
1- Improved generation of annotations including use of standard ontologies
2- Improved organization and publication of content
3- Improved advertising of collections and content to potential customers
4- Monitoring the use of works distributed by the agency
5- Automatic generation of alerts on detection of possible rights infringements
B) Services for third party archives
1- Providing the services listed in Point A to third party archives represented by
the agency
C) Services for freelance photographers
1- Providing the services listed in Point A to third party archives represented by
the agency
D) Services for education and research
1- Providing access to agency and third party archives to teachers and researchers
E) Services to consumers
1- On-line Bookshop
2- Advertisements about books and exhibitions
3- Gadgets and merchandizing (Alinari has three show rooms in Rome, Florence,
Venice that sell books, visual-art furniture, decorations, etc. )
4- Creation of albums shared between a certain number of users (social
networking)
Alinari believes that among these options CONVERGENCE is most attractive as a
basis for services for the professional segment of the market. In what follows,
therefore we will describe how CONVERGENCE could be used to create such a
service.
1.2.4.3 Photo Archive Management
The main users of the proposed service would be:

Photographers: professional and advanced non-professional photographers who
produce sophisticated, high-quality pictures and wish to maintain their own online
galleries

Commercial Customers: publishers and designers who would purchase pictures
for books, brochures, web sites etc through an “Alinari marketplace”

Archive managers: Alinari personnel who would use CONVERGENCE to
improve their efficiency and create custom proposals for customers
Figure 5 shows how these different users might interact with the service.
Figure 5: Alinari PAM: a functional scenario
The services which Alinari considers most relevant are the following:
1. For agencies
a. Building and maintaining a PAM
b. Making the PAM visible to all CONVERGENCE users
c. Adding value to photos (annotation)
d. Making it easier for users to find photos
e. Managing use licenses
f. Managing marketplace services
g. Monitoring image flow (download processes)
h. Reducing required bandwidth and server capacity
2. For photographers
a. Creation of their own galleries
b. Incorporating licensing information in their photos
c. Advertising galleries and individual photos to the whole
CONVERGENCE network
3. For commercial customers
a. Executing searches over the CONVERGENCE network
b. Subscribing to topics of particular interests
c. Buying a set of images and the corresponding use license (using prepaid credits)
1.2.4.4 Business flow and transactions
Figure 6 provides a stylized picture of possible revenues and cost flows in a current
stock photo agency
Figure 6: Stylized picture of cost and revenue flows in a typical stock photo agency
Alinari believes that CONVERGENCE can improve this picture,
1. By reducing process costs for photo annotation (i.e. by facilitating content
search, identification, clustering and organization), and content management
(creation, translation and checking of metadata, rights checking etc.)
2. By opening new market opportunities (in particular online services for the
professional photography market)7
Figure 7 illustrates some of these possibilities.
7
Alinari began to offer online services at the end of 2011. At the time of writing, these services are
targeted exclusively to the consumer market.
Figure 7: Areas in which CONVERGENCE can reduce costs and generate new market
opportunities
1.2.5 Implementation: comparison with traditional solutions
Figure 8: Typical digitization workflow
Figure 8 depicts a CONVERGENCE-based PAM solution providing indexing,
uploading and content sharing with a licensee server to control access to the content
repository. This solution provides a number of important advantages for Alinari and
for end-users.
Improved search and notification. Compared to traditional solutions,
CONVERGENCE provides important new search features for users seeking to locate
specific photos
1. The possibility of searching for photos meeting well-specified search criteria
(location, period, quality, technical characteristics etc.)
2. The possibility of using domain-specific ontologies to refine search criteria
3. Support for the definition
CONVERGENCE CDS
of
optimal
search
criteria
from
the
4. The possibility receiving notifications every time a photographer publishes a
photograph meeting specific search criteria
5. The possibility of searching multiple archives in a single operation
(distributed search)
These possibilities benefit photographers, who will find it easier to sell their photos;
professional users of photos, who will find it easier to find the photos they need; and
Alinari, which will cut its process costs and be more attractive to its customers.
Annotation. Since the year 2000, Alinari has annotated photos using standardized inhouse procedures in which every image is entered in a local database and checked by
specially trained photo librarians and picture experts, who define and enhance the
metadata for the photo. To an increasing extent, Alinari staff use standardized
keywords (authority files, etc.), to guarantee that photos will be easily and correctly
retrieved. This is standard procedure in many stock photography agencies and is well
accepted by professional customers. However, it is expensive both for the agency and
its customers. Services based on the CONVERGENCE CDS could make annotation
far easier, allowing photographers to annotate their own creations, saving costs both
for themselves and for agencies.
Referencing the content creator. In 2007, a survey of 400 photographer members of
the Stock Artists Alliance showed that photographers who license their images for
assignment or stock photography usually embed their copyright and contact
information in the photographs. However many of these same photographers claim
that their customers systematically remove this information. They are thus forced to
purchase costly software to watermark their photographs. CONVEGENCE mitigates
this problem by embedding ownership and licensing information in the VDI for the
photo, by preventing unauthorized downloads and by providing owners with a report
every time a photo is downloaded.
Long-term archiving and interoperability. Many experts used to believe that digital
images and text files were for all practical purposes eternal. In reality, however, this is
not the case. Changes in technology force archive owners to continuously migrate
their content between different media, and different file formats – often losing data in
the process. This problem is exacerbated by the problem of search. It is difficult to
ensure that a user can find a press-photo that is more than 50 years old among 10
million other photos, without being forced to view ten thousand wrong hits. In most
cases, additional metadata are added to make the photo searchable (and findable) for
all the different kinds of customers. CONVERGENCE would help to alleviate this
process by:
1. Allowing photographers to store photographs on the network, without using
physical media
2. Providing automatic conversion between formats
3. Making it much easier for photographers to annotate their images.
1.2.6 Designing and deploying a CONVERGENCE-based PAM
Deploying a CONVERGENCE-based PAM would require the following steps:
1- Development of custom software. Development of a CONVERGENCEbased PAM would require the development of custom server software. Early
deployment would also require the development of specialized client
software 8 . Server and user software would both incorporate the
CONVERGENCE middleware. The functionality incorporated in the
middleware (mechanisms for publication, subscription, user identification,
licensing, security etc.) would drastically reduce the development effort
required to develop the software. The majority of this effort would probably
be dedicated to support for agency-specific business processes and to user
interaction issues
1- Deploying a CONVERGENCE island. Trial implementations could use a
single CONVERGENCE peer, located on agency premises. However, this
solution have many of the same disadvantages as current web-based solutions.
A fully operational implementation would probably install peers on multiple
sites, each serving a significant user population, e.g. on the sites of third party
archives managed by the agency, or on the sites of major user organizations
(e.g. newspapers). Requirements for installing a CONVERGENCE peer are
low: the peer will run on conventional server hardware, requires very little
management. Servers would be accessible to any authorized user with an
Internet connection. Caching of content on the server would reduce network
traffic for the agency
2- Supporting services (user identification, licensing services, application
development, security services, CDS-services). In an early deployment all
these services would probably be provided by the technical staff of the agency,
which would provide the same services for third party archives it manages. If
CONVERGENCE were taken up on a wider scale, these services could be
outsourced to specialist organizations, reducing the need to use internal
agency resources.
Preliminary studies by the Alinari technical and financial team suggest that
implementing a commercial PAM based on CONVERGENCE technology would
involve initial capital expenditure of the order of Eur 750.000, mostly for personnel
training, adaptation of the content database and metadata to new requirements, and
updates to IT infrastructure.
The analysis suggests from year two onwards the system would begin to earn
revenues from content licensing, royalties and revenue shares) and that by years 3-4 it
may be possible to attract new partners or sponsors to the operation. Taking into
account savings in running and management costs, it should be possible to achieve
break-even by year 5.
8
In a mature CONVERGENCE eco-system, users could possibly use a generic VDI-BROWSER.
1.2.7 Business models
The scenario just described requires business models that maximize opportunities for
commercial exploitation. At the same time, it is important for stock photo agencies
that these models should not disrupt their usual way of doing business.
In what follows, we will briefly analyze agency requirements for the three normal
modes of business: B2B, B2C and sB2B.

B2B: on the B2B market, individual transactions can be very valuable and are
typically based on custom contracts. A CONVERGENCE-based PAM would
continue to follow this model. This implies that agencies would offer packages
of services to their customers and might in some cases be willing to customize
services for specific customers, at least in the early deployment phases
-
B2C: B2C transactions should not require any direct interaction between the
company and the user. The user chooses the service(s) that interest her and
pays by credit card or Pay Pal. In general, transaction costs make micropayments inadvisable. It is probable therefore that agencies would choose a
subscription model in which customers buy credit allowing them to make a
series of transactions.
-
sB2B: small businesses (professional photographers) and enterprises need a
reverse version of the B2C model. It is not economically viable to pay the
photographer every time a consumer purchases one of her photos. It is
probable therefore that agencies would make payments only every 50 or every
100 sales.
Given the way right managed stock agencies operate, prices for transactions have to
incorporate remuneration for all rights holders. This means that prices can vary from
collection to collection or even from picture to picture.
In general photographers receive a commission on sales 30 to 70%. The size of the
commission depends on a number of factors including the quality of the photo and the
reputation of the photographer.
1.2.7.1 SWOT Analysis
Player
SWOT Analysis
 The CONVERGENCE framework is a standards-based
solution available free of charge
Stock
Photography
Agent

S
CONVERGENCE reduces the cost of developing and
operating a new platform (especially important for small
and medium sized agencies)
A mature CONVERGENCE system would make it easier
for agencies to reach a world-wide audience
CONVERGENCE has strong, easily scalable technology
Stock photography agents already own the content for such
services and already have a loyal customer base.
CONVERGENCE allows agencies to define and enforce
licensing conditions and to monitor the use of the images
they distribute
The CONVERGENCE CDS facilitates the annotation of
images and makes it easier for users to find images meeting
their requirements
CONVERGENCE caching can reduce central requirements
for bandwidth and server resources.
 Many major players on the market, gain from a situation
in which users have (practically) free access to copyrighted
materials

W
Many users (including professional users of photos) also
benefit from this situation
CONVERGENCE has no commercial organization to
market CONVERGENCE-based services (such as PAM)
The lifetime of the CONVERGENCE Consortium is
limited to the lifetime of the project. This means that there
is no guarantee that the CONVERGENCE framework will
be maintained after the end of the project.
CONVERGENCE has little time to make itself known to
potential customers
CONVERGENCE is a research project whose goal is to
build prototypes. The implementation of commercial
quality products and services is outside the scope of the
project
CONVERGENCE is completely new: users and
stakeholders need time to gain confidence with it.
The world economical crisis has reduced consumer buying
power, reducing the attractiveness of paying services
 Authors need new ways of protecting their intellectual
property, monitoring use of their work and receiving a fair
price for it.
O
Many different actors are looking for ways of problems
related to orphan works.
There are currently no competitors for the kind of services
described in the scenario
 Given the size of the players operating on the market,
legal threats should not be under-evaluated.

T
The window of opportunity for investment is relatively
short.
Deploying the planned service will require significant
investment in hardware, licenses to commercial software,
people etc.
Unforeseen market barriers may prevent uptake by endusers
Large players may introduce their own solutions which
preclude market entry for newcomers
CONVERGENCE may not prove
professional market it is targeting.
credible
to
the
CONVERGENCE may not have the commercial strength to
successfully market its solution .
Table 1: SWOT Analysis: Alinari scenario
1.3 Video for research and education - FMSH
1.3.1 Scenario Description
1.3.1.1 Presentation of FMSH and ESCoM program
The FMSH - Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme – (Foundation House of
Human Sciences) is a French not-for profit cultural and scientific organization whose
mission is to promote research in the social sciences and humanities. Since the
1960’s, this foundation has developed various innovating research programs and
created an important book library about social sciences. Working in relation with
many universities and cultural institutions, one of the main goals of FMSH is to
articulate and disseminate national and international researches (http://www.mshparis.fr/)
The ESCoM - Equipe Sémiotique Cognitive et Nouveaux Medias – (traduction en
anglais), the group that coordinates the FMSH’s contribution to CONVERGENCE, is
one of FMSH’s research program specialized on semiotics applied to new
technologies and medias. dedicated to research in the field of …………
(http://www.semionet.fr/)
In 2001, ESCoM launched the ARA program - Audiovisual Research Archives – a
main web video library dedicated to collect, archive, index and disseminate cultural
and scientific heritages. The current ARA corpus is composed of more than 5500
hours of videos available in 16 languages and concerning scientific and cultural topics
(such as social history, social and cultural anthropology, language studies and
linguistics, archeology, etc).
http://www.archivesaudiovisuelles.fr/EN/
In 2008, ESCoM developed another main program, named ASA-SHS project -Projet
de R&D financé par l'ANR) consacré au développement d'une ontologie de description de corpus
audiovisuels du
Parler des 2 channels : Arc et PCIA
Parler du nombre de descriptions: stock d’archives
1.3.1.2 FMSH Scenario
The “Video in the cloud and analyses on the Earth” scenario, presented in D2.2,
illustrated how CONVERGENCE could help FMSH to achieve its mains goals, which
are to collect, manage and disseminate audiovisual materials, making them available
to any public (such as researcher, educators, students or anyone) through a scientific
media.
The specific implementation of this scenario concerns the AICH project (Andean
Intangible Cultural Heritage) based on an anthropologist’s investigations, Valérie
Legrand-Galarza, a doctoral researcher in anthropology and linguistics doing field
work with Andean population in Peru and Bolivia. As part of her work she collects
audiovisual material about intangible cultural heritage (performing arts, rituals,
spoken language, music, etc.) and develops a personal web video channel (AICH)
using the system made available by FMSH for archiving, describing and broadcasting
audiovisual data. In this context, one of the key issues she needs to face is how to
respect indigenous people’s rights to access and to control the use of material
concerning them, raising the issue of the ethical exploitation of audiovisual material
for purpose of research, education and knowledge transmission.
In what follows, we describe the activities and relationships between the different
actors involved in the 3 main domains of application: knowledge transmission,
research and education. We also generalize this scenario, illustrating how
CONVERGENCE could provide similar services to many organizations with needs
similar to those of FMSH.
-
Knowledge Transmission
This domain refers to dissemination and transmission of knowledge in social sciences
through audiovisual media on various web supports (personal website, FMSH
channel, external channel, etc.). For example, an institution or cultural center could
promote and transmit knowledge contained in video material to general or specific
public, by making it available on different video channels such as institutional
thematic channels.
The scenario shows the specific use of CONVERGENCE to advertise and transmit
video-based research material to restricted target audiences: in this case, researchers
studying indigenous communities in the Andes, their students, and members of the
communities themselves.
Analyze video
Stream video
VD
Video Distributor
VMO
Video Material Owner
Analyst
Post analysis
Watch video
is
lys
na
ea
s
w
Bro
Pos
t vi
deo
Browse channel
VCU
Video Channel User
-
Host channel
VCO
Video Channel Owner
VCH
Video Channel Holder
Research
This activity refers to research and analysis of audiovisual material in social and
human sciences domains (anthropology, humanities, literatures, linguistics,
intercultural studies, history, etc.). For example, a researcher in university analyses a
video corpus (produced by the researcher himself or a partner) using a “user
ontology” illustrating the specificities of his research field, then he posts the analyses
on his personal video channel that promotes his research results.
The scenario demonstrates how the CONVERGENCE Community Dictionary
Service allows a researcher to analyze and annotate the video material, adding new
perspectives to its original value.
Analyze video
Stream video
VD
Video Distributor
Post video
VMO
Video Material Owner
Host channel
Researcher
(Analyst, VCO)
VCH
Video Channel Holder
Watch video
is
lys
na nel
a
se han
c
ow
Br wse
o
Br
VCU
Video Channel User
-
Education
Finally the scenario shows how the video material could be used in educational area,
such as classes in social sciences or linguistics using audiovisual data as pedagogical
resources. For example, a teacher analyses videos for his class, and then asks his
students to make their own analysis of videos (produced by an institution, a teacher, a
researcher...) during the classes, using an user ontology dedicated to the pedagogical
domain of the course. The analysis of students (as well as teacher’s analysis) are
posted on the educative video channel as pedagogical resources for distant learning.
Analyze video
Stream video
Post video
Host channel
VMO
Video Material Owner
Teacher
(Analyst, VCO)
VCH
Video Channel Holder
o
ide
hv
eo
atc
W
vid
ze
aly
An
P
Bro ost
a
Bro wse naly
ws ana sis
ly
ec
ha sis
nn
el
VD
Video Distributor
Student (Analyst, VCU)
In these three domains of application, the main uses of VDI technology about videos’
exploitation concern:
1. The management of videos rights:
-
Protecting VMO’s rights on the exploitation of their material (Analysis /
Broadcasting) : by including licences accompanying video
Limit / identify specific users : by encrypting video, granting specific rights
Limit/select access to material (partial access): by notifying accessible videos
Limit/select broadcasting of material: by notifying videos free for
broadcasting
Select users and actions on videos: select specific users or VCOs and types of
actions allowed (playing, copying, posting, etc.)
2. The sharing of information:
-
Create groups of interests about common thematic : create a network of
“partners users”
- Notify news about video to other users: new post, new analysis, new
broadcasting, new governed copy
Notify request from partners’ users to other partners (to download, to analyze, to
broadcast new video)
1.3.1.3 FMSH’s needs
As a scientific institution working with audiovisual data in the domains of research
and education, FMSH needs technologies that allow individuals and organizations to
autonomously produce, manage, diffuse, exploit and preserve corpora of digital
records documenting a cultural heritage, a domain of knowledge, a social practice, a
personal (or group) history, etc. A key feature of the scenario is also the use of the
CONVERGENCE REL to protect the moral rights of user communities, in this case
indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes.
1. FMSH needs technology to ensure that sharing of knowledge in this way does
not compromise authorship or intellectual property and that audiovisual
records documenting “sensitive” fields of expertise should be used in an
ethically appropriate way that respects the legally recognized rights of content
owners and the intentions and decisions of the moral owners.
2. FMSH and ESCoM demonstrate that an audiovisual record is not just a static
deposit of knowledge but can stimulate knowledge creation thanks to
comments, analysis, indexing, referencing activities, etc. In this case, FMSH
needs new technological features to share and also protect this knowledge
accompanying the videos, and to select the rights of future users about it.
FMSH’s needs are similar to other organizations working in the same sector, such as
universities, cultural institutions, indigenous community, museums, etc. It is evident
that similar methods could also be used in other fields that regularly make use of
video material: in particular the arts but also completely different areas such as
medicine or physics.
1. Licensing of VDIs to public institutions (such as museums, archives or
libraries) and social (virtual or “real”) communities intending to create an
online audiovisual library (for instance, in cultural heritage): the
CONVERGENCE network provider sells or cedes free licenses of a VDI
“service” for the basic registration of collected videos, the management of the IPR
and the “watermarking” of stored videos, the transcoding of the stored videos in
different streaming formats and the standard online publishing of stored videos.
2. Licensing of VDIs in the realm of pedagogical activities: the CONVERGENCE
network provider sells or cedes free licenses of a VDI “service” to pedagogical
institutions (schools, universities, …) or individual persons (teachers, tutors, …)
for the creation of video channels, the constitution of online personal video
corpora, the (virtual) segmentation of videos following pedagogical objectives and
the use of specific domain ontologies in order to enhance the pedagogical interest
and relevancy of parts of previously segmented videos
3. Licensing of VDIs for translation activities: the CONVERGENCE network
provider sells or cedes free licenses of a VDI “service” to individuals and/or
institutions working in the audiovisual translation market in order to enable these
actors to open monolingual video resources to the intrinsically multilingual digital
knowledge market.
4. Licensing of VDIs for public communication and valorisation activities: the
CONVERGENCE network provider sells or cedes free licenses of a VDI
“service” to individuals or (public or private) institutions in order to enable them
to disseminate and valorise their (cultural, historical, scientific, …) heritage in
form of short video trailers, online publicity, inserts in electronic messages, etc.
1.3.2 Market analysis
1.3.2.1 Research, knowledge transmission and education through video
data
Nowadays, with implementations of audiovisual and digital technologies the needs
and uses of video materials are increasing in cultural, scientific and educational
domains. Indeed, since one decade many researchers are working with audiovisual
material to documents their researches, especially in the domain of social sciences. In
the educational area, a lot of teachers are using video as pedagogical resources,
especially in linguistics studies, language learning and distance education.
In this framework, many universities and scientific institutions (such as the CNRS ()
or INA) have already developed their own system to archive videos, which are not
compatible with one to another.
In this new context of using video material for purposes of research, knowledge
transmission or education, the main and current issues are:
- There is not a common archive system which could be used by different
institutions to put in common their work
- There is no such a scientific media allowing researchers and institutions to
properly broadcasting their videos in a legal and scientific framework
- There is no video licences: The fact that audiovisual datas are considered as a
new object for scientific purposes, confront us to a legal vacuum
1.3.2.2 Web video platforms and new social media today
Online multimedia archives: interactive and attractive media for cultural videos
The advantage of new technologies and internet is undeniable and, actually, these new
media provide the necessary conditions for processing intangible material, such as
cultural or scientific audiovisual content. The classical approach for archiving used by
the heritage professionals had to adapt to the fluidic forms constituting Intangibles
Heritages and move toward much more interactive platforms and processing methods.
Ever since the 1980s, the Internet revolution has been highly beneficial for publishing
audiovisual data which had previously not been, or at least under represented
institutionally. The interactivity of the Internet, coupled with its ease of access and
exchange between the far corners of the world makes this media a vector for
publishing and promoting global living heritages, thereby enabling all the users to
view hitherto unpublished and inaccessible cultural or scientific phenomena.
France : 36,6 % of Internet users have consulted videos online
According
to
Médiamétrie,
10,599 millions of Internet users
are video online users in april
2007, ie 36,6 % from the Internet
users population. They were only
6,953 millions of Internet users to
consult videos (ie 26,2 % of
Internet users), in the same
period in 2006.
ESCoM, through the development of various online audiovisual archiving programs,
has ensured the important protection and wide dissemination of intangible heritages
whether through interviews with specialists, seminars, or even cultural events. The
creation of thematic folders and networks of links between different recordings of
videos enables the conception of a dynamic approach to living heritages. Digitalized
online multimedia archives can also be used as a means of communication not only
for the conservation purposes, allowing us to effectively account for the living nature
of these videos, but also to promote it in the wide area of exchange that is the Internet.
New means of disseminating audiovisual resources via the Internet have also created
a new dynamic for sharing heritage and revalorizing it by updating it. In fact, there is
no better means than the Internet for promoting and providing access to endangered
heritages in attractive domains and carriers of modernity. Beyond merely being a
simple archiving and publishing platform, an audiovisual portal on living heritage has
a genuine attractive potential for new generations as well as valorizing and
revitalizing these heritages. Dissemination via a new media filter can prove to be
beneficial for heritages which are judged to be “traditional”.
Articulation between scientific and popular platforms
At the same time, the popularity of internet and new media platforms allow to develop
new popular ways of sharing videos on the net. The web video platforms (such as
You Tube, Vimeo or Daily Motion) and social networks (such as Facebook, or
Twitter) offer various ways of disseminating audiovisual data and informations
accompanying it. They could actually be used for academic communication, but they
won’t allow an advanced user to manage specific rights on sensitive video contents.
In this connection, see the articles (Jirasri)
59 % of Internet users video amateur go on sharing sites sites de partage
Where Internet users find their videos ?
59 % of the Internet users, all ages, declare
finding videos they view on sharing sites, such
as DailyMotion or YouTube, according to a poll
made by Harris Interactive in november 2007.
In the 15-24 years, this source is the most
acclaimed one (85 %), with blogs and personal
websites (51 %).
Concerning the types of videos viewed, the
movie trailers (56%), humorous videos (55 %)
and musical video-clips (50 %) are at the top,
especially in the people under 35.
It is therefore a new challenge to articulate scientific audiovisual archives and
informal/popular multimedia platforms to succeed a new way of broadcasting and
protecting video material.
France : the most common operations on the web
Type of operations
Dec 2004
variation
Research of news
64 %
-3
Bank operations or consultations
53 %
+3
IM
42 %
+9
Listening radio online
34 %
+6
Sharing photos with others Internet users
33 %
+3
Downloading softwares
30 %
-1
Watching movie trailers
28 %
+6
Participating in a Chat
24 %
+3
Participating in a forum
21 %
+3
Sharing files with others Internet users
19 %
--
Downloading music MP3
15 %
-6
Consulting videos
14 %
+3
Games online or in networks
13 %
+3
Downloading games
12 %
+0
Downloading videos
11 %
+0
Source : Ipsos, enquête profiling*
Mis à jour le 11/01/2005
Note : This poll was made with Intern users from 15 and over, on more than 200 websites.
1.3.2.3 Internet and intellectual properties on/over videos
Modern-day information society relies on increasing the number of digital resources.
Music, films, software, and sensitive personal data (bank accounts, medical records,
billing etc.) are stored and moved as digital files and braodcasted, in their own
formats. Designed to route information between computers, the Internet is rapidly
evolving into an Internet of things1 where services, media, and Real World Objects
(RWOs) (e.g. products, people and places2) and their corresponding data are
individually identified.
In the context of this new Internet, the main center of interest is no longer machines
but content. At present, the content management solutions are proprietary,n noninteroperable, and restricted to certain types of information. Hence, there is an
increasing need for more effective means of managing and organizing information
resources, ensuring their traceability and the ability to search and filter them, as well
as to copy, protect, and synchronize them while guaranteeing their integrity and
controlling access to them and their usage.
Internet, média twice more influent than TV
Media influence rating
Internet Users in France
on
In their second edition of their
Digital
influence
rating,
Fleishman-Hillard
&
Harris
Interactive measured in France
an increase of 15 points for
Internet in two years.
With audiovisual data, still considered as new objects from the international legacy
perspective, we have to face with a legal vacuum concerning rights and intellectual
properties. The creation of a Web audiovisual portal which publishes living cultural
heritages in the public domain raises legal questions, notably about rights over content
and publication rights concerning data collection practices and using oral data.
Beyond the current “Image Reproduction Rights” and “Author Rights”, we have to
consider the “Contents Holders’ Rights” concerning the speech and ideas developed
by the person filmed/interviewed in the video. At the present, the current technologies
can’t allow us to recognize and protect these Contents Holders’ Rights. For example,
if a Video Material Owner specify the names and participation of Content Holder on
the videos credits at the end, this part could ever be cut and this information could
disappear, there is no way to ensure and record it permanently on the video with
current technologies. On this specific point, a future technology should allow to
specify these rights in the video permanent metadata.
1.3.2.4 Specific market applied to FMSH scenario
Actions
In the FMSH scenario, the central missions and actions are:
-
to constitute an audiovisual, multimedia portal of scientific heritage in social
and human sciences;
-
to make this heritage available to any interested person or community;
-
to investigate and to develop the scientific, methodological and technical
means enabling any institution, even any individual to create and diffuse
his/her own audiovisual resources in form of online libraries or archives;
-
to investigate the uses and exploitations/appropriations of audiovisual data in
given social contexts
-
to investigate also new, “future” forms of knowledge capturing and
appropriation
Actors
In the specific AICH project’s scenario, FMSH uses CONVERGENCE to provide a
novel service for:
o University researcher in semiotics and linguistics – as “Ontology creator”
o Researcher in anthropology and linguistics - as “Video Material Owner”,
“Video Channel Owner” (Owner of AICH channel) and “Analyst”
o Teacher in anthropology and quechua linguistics as “Analyst”
o Teacher in Intercultural Communication classes - as “Video Channel Owner”
(Owner of CCA Channel), “Video Channel User” and “Analyst”
o Field anthropologists working in the area as “Video Material Owner” and
“analyst”
o Students of Quechua and Intercultural Communication classes as “Video
Channel Users”
o Local communities with an interest in the materials produced during the study
– as “Video Content Holders”
o Videos channel holders, from scientific local institutions as MSH or
worldwide distributor as You Tube.
o Partners, as Video Material Owners and Video Channel Owners.
Users perfils
By year: Google Analytics
Time spent
by visit
Visitors
Visits
January 2012
10 658
13 249
79 384
5.99
00 :06 :10
2011
100 396
136 582
1 134 901
8.31
00 :05 :45
2010
110 297
151 865
2 112 220
13.91
00 :05 :28
2009
143 944
192 073
2 756 096
14.35
00 :05 :11
Average by day : Google Analytics
Visitors
Visits
Pages
viewed
Pages
viewed by
visit
Time spent
by visit
January 2012
344
427
2 561
5.99
00 :06 :10
2011
275
374
3 109
8.31
00 :05 :45
2010
302
416
5 787
13.91
00 :05 :28
2009
394
526
7 551
14.35
00 :05 :11
Portal
ARA
-
Pages
viewed by
visit
Pages
viewed
Portal
ARA
-
Paragraphe concernant les profils d’utilisateurs???
1.3.2.5 Strategic target markets
ESCoM identified three main domains of application : Knowledge transmission in
social sciences, Research in social sciences and Education in cultural studies and
linguistics. In these cases, the main target markets are:
-
Universities
-
Research institutions in social sciences (anthropology, history, archaeology,
etc)
-
Cultural institutions (public, private, international, etc)
-
Museums
Subsequent analysis identifies 4 target markets for CONVERGENCE-derived
services provided by FMSH-ESCoM structure, considered as a Technology provider:
1. The Knowledge production” market in the digital humanities (academia)
2. The Cultural Heritage
3. The arts
4. Other academics areas
Knowledge production in the digital humanities
This market consists of individuals (university researcher, teachers, students) and
organizations (universities, research labs, museums, etc.) who use video technology to
collect, process, analyze, publish, and archive information relevant to research and
teaching in the digital humanities – an area that traditionally attracts only limited
funding but where practitioners have significant technological know-how. As in the
case of the “cultural heritage” market services are nearly always provided free of
charge. Many university departments and laboratories maintain web servers, which
they use to document their activities and/or to distribute teaching materials to
students. However, the majority of these initiatives are relatively small-scale and very
few have an audience that extends beyond the immediate community, the site was
created to serve.
Cultural heritage
This market consists of individuals and organizations (universities, research
laboratories, local and international NGOs, cultural or scientific institutions) engaged
in the protection of “intangible cultural heritage”. Their main actions consist to
support communities to preserve, make known, appropriate and exploit their cultural
heritage9. One of the major challenges in this work is the production of audiovisual
recordings documenting the performing arts, social practices, rituals, knowledge and
skills, etc.), the digitization of existing recording, and the creation of communitybased audiovisual archives (as in the FMSH scenario). UNESCO calls this process
"Safeguarding without freezing"10. In nearly all cases these services are provided free
of charge.
A key characteristic of organizations working in this area is that they have a lot of
specific know-how about their field of activity but only limited access to funding.
Some organizations (like FMSH) also have significant technical know-how. These
organizations have a strong interest in developing their services and in offering them
to other organizations and laboratories 11 . In some cases, it may be possible to
organize joint development projects involving more than one institution. In general,
however, there is relatively little interest in purchasing services from commercial
suppliers.
The arts
9
cf. UNESCO's 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage ratified by
30
member
states
and
brought
into
force
in
2006
(official
website:
http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=EN&pg=home)
10
cf. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00012
11
FMSH already provides services to a broad range of organizations and laboratories in France.
European or internernational cooperation is less common.
The arts (theater, dance, film, music, poetry, visual arts, etc) are another area
of activity that routinely uses video resources for research and education, and
as a means to publicize its work. In the “mainstream”, much of this work is
handled by large media companies, which distribute media as a paying
service. However, there is also a very large community, which does not have
access to these resources and which wishes to maintain control of its own
intellectual property rights. This market has many features in common with the
market served by ESCoMExtension of the ESCoM model to other areas of
academia
Although ESCoM services are designed for use in the digital humanities, this is not
the only area of academia that routinely uses video resources in teaching, which
routinely add value to video resources through annotation or which prefer to use
“home-grown” materials rather than commercial teaching products. Other sectors,
whose needs partially overlap with those of the digital humanities include medicine,
psychology and the teaching of foreign languages. ESCoM could then use a
CONVERGENCE-based system to provide services to similar user communities as
well as on research and education communities in other areas of academia.
1.3.3 Analysis of currently available solutions
Unlike the stock photo agencies considered in the previous scenario, and the
universities considered in the next, the majority of organizations working in the
digital humanities, or in market sectors with similar needs have not deployed largescale technology platforms. Although a few, like FMSH, attempt to make effective
use of new technology, the majority relay on conventional web technology and
databases. Video delivery is largely delegated to large scale commercial providers
such as YouTube.
1.3.3.1 Weaknesses of current solutions

Building and maintaining up-to-date web-based solutions for the digital
humanities would require major investments in technical and human resources
which few organizations can afford, even when they have the necessary
technical know-how.

The majority of organizations providing video services for the digital
humanities are relatively small and their sites have few users and few
incoming links. As a result, their ranking in search engines is usually
extremely low.

This means that although specialists in the digital humanities are uniquely
placed to make effective use of semantic and other advanced technologies,
very few actually do so. Very few services provide researchers with ontologybased tools to annotate or search for data.

The commercial services, many sites use to distribute video, distribute videos
on their own terms, preventing research departments from defining their own
licensing terms. They provide no encryption, no way of restricting access to a
given group of users, no way of enforcing license terms, and no way of
monitoring the way video resources are used. These limitations mean that
some “culturally sensitive” materials (e.g. depictions of religious rituals)
cannot be distributed at all.

The majority of services offer only very simple means of searching for
resources. Very few allow provide a mechanism for notifying users of new
resources when they become available.
1.3.4 Market needs, products and services
1.3.4.1 Videos for research and education: market needs
On the basis of the analysis outlined in the previous section, we believe that nonprofit organizations using video for research and education constitute a potential
market for CONVERGENCE-based services. The market includes:

Organizations engaged in the protection of cultural heritage

University departments, laboratories, research institutions working in the
digital humanities and potentially in other disciplines (medicine, language
teaching etc.)

Academic and non-academic organizations working in the arts (primarily
organizations outside the commercial mainstream)
The common characteristics of these organizations include:

A strong interest in producing their own “branded” services

An interest in avoiding the use of commercial services for video distribution
(download or streaming)

The need to achieve the maximum possible visibility for these services

The need to deliver services free of charge

A need to minimize capital investment and operating costs (including costs for
bandwidth and server capacity)

The need to monitor and control access to and use of video resources

The need to add value to video resources through the use of meta data and
annotations

A strong interest in the use of semantic technology to facilitate the generation
of metadata and to make it easier for users to find the resources that interest
them

The availability of technical know-how

Limited ability to fund major capital or operating expenditures
1.3.4.2 Products and services
Given the goals and characteristics of the market, the CONVERGENCE framework
could provide a valuable tool for low-cost development of branded platforms serving
the needs of particular organizations and their educational and research partners. The
case described in the original user scenario in which FMSH collaborates with local
communities in Peru, and with University partners in France provides a typical
example of the way such a platform could operate.
The key technical characteristics of such platforms would be likely to include:

Custom interaction design and branding to meet the needs of the organization
developing the platform

Use of the CONVERGENCE framework to facilitate development of the
platform

Use of the CONVERGENCE CDS to facilitate the definition of metadata

Use of the CONVERGENCE REL to define licensing conditions for video
resources

Publishing and advertisement of video resources via CONVERGENCE
publishing mechanisms

Use of CoSec, CoMid and CoNET to enforce licensing conditions

Use of the CONVERGENCE CDS to facilitate the definition of user search
criteria

Asynchronous user search for video resources using the CONVERGENCE
subscription mechanism

Use of CONVERGENCE event reporting to monitor the use of video
resources

Use of CONET caching to reduce requirements for bandwidth and server
resources and to optimize local delivery of video resources.
1.3.5 Deployment of CONVERGENCE-based platforms
Deploying a CONVERGENCE-based platform for the management of video
resources would involve software development, the creation and management of the
necessary technical infrastructure and the creation of effective mechanisms for
organizational support.
1- Software development. Requirements for software development are similar
to those for the stock photography scenario described in paragraph 1.2.6. In
many scenarios, it would be desirable to develop new tools for the
manipulation and annotation of video resources and for the management of
ontologies. In some (see below) it might also be necessary to develop tools for
video streaming. Software development would probably be performed by
technical specialists working inside the organization responsible for the
management of the platform. The software could then be made available to the
organization’s partners in research and education (e.g. in the FMSH scenario,
local communities in the Andes, university researchers working with FMSH
and their students)
2- Infrastructure. While CONVERGENCE could theoretically run on a single
server, such a solution would defeat the purpose of installing
CONVERGENCE. We therefore envisage a solution in which
CONVERGENCE peers would be installed in relevant departments of the
organization providing the service and on the premises of key partners (in the
FMSH case, local communities in Peru, university departments using the
service). Requirements for these servers would be the same as in the Stock
Photography case. Servers would be accessible to any authorized user with an
Internet connection. Caching of content on the server would reduce bandwidth
and server capacity requirements for the organization running the service,
while improving quality of service for end-users, which in some cases could
access the service over a high-speed LAN or local wireless network.
One issue specific to this scenario is video streaming. In some cases this
would be provided by the organization managing the service; in others it could
be outsourced to a commercial organization specialized in this kind of service.
In general, however, organizations would not use mass-market services.
3- Organizational infrastructure (user identification, licensing services,
application development, security services, CDS-services). Two of the
Unique Selling Points of the services envisaged here are CONVERGENCE
licensing, and the CONVERGENCE CDS, which makes it easier for users to
exploit semantic technology. Exploiting these features of CONVERGENCE
requires an appropriate technology infrastructure, which could easily be
provided by the organization managing the service. However, it also requires a
strong organizational infrastructure to define licensing conditions, to monitor
the use of resources, and to define ontologies. In the case of FMSH, ESCoM is
in a perfect position to provide these services to its partners. In this specific
scenario, therefore, we envisage a single organization providing a full range of
support services. In other scenarios, however, it is likely that the organizations
managing would lack the necessary competences. In this case, some services
(e.g. definition of ontologies) would probably be provided by third parties.
FMSH is a good example of a potential provider.
1.3.6 Business models
The scenario described here differs from the stock photography scenario in that the
goal of the organizations responsible for managing services would not be to maximize
their commercial advantage but to provide services to a network of partners (local
communities, researchers, university faculty). In general, services would be provided
free of charge. There would thus be no direct flow of revenues among partners.
However the existence of such networks usually implies the existence formal or
informal agreements defining the role of participants, which may include an
agreement to share the effort and investment for developing and operating the service.
In most cases, this involves contributions of manpower and competences and
agreement to shoulder local costs (e.g. for the installation of servers), rather than
direct contributions of cash. In the last analysis costs are covered by the partners’
normal sources of funding (public contributions, private donations, student fees etc.).
1.3.6.1 SWOT Analysis
Player SWOT Analysis
The CONVERGENCE framework is a standards-based solution
available free of charge
 CONVERGENCE reduces the cost of developing and
operating advanced services for small organizations (such as the
majority of organizations operating on the market considered here)
A mature CONVERGENCE system would make it easier for these
organizations to reach a world-wide audience
CONVERGENCE has strong, easily scalable technology
 CONVERGENCE offers organizations a powerful means to
trace the use of videos and associated resources and to protect the
legal and moral rights of content owners.
FMSH

S
CONVERGENCE technology offers strong advantages to
organizations (like ESCoM-FMSH) that have already developed
important resources (core descriptive ontology, common thesaurus,
library of description models, ...), while protecting its rights and
monitoring the way the resources are used
CONVERGENCE allows individual users and organizations to
define licenses for their resources and to monitor the way they are
used.
CONVERGENCE allows content owners to specify appropriate
licenses for “culturally sensitive” video materials. In this way, they
can provide public access to materials, which it would not be
possible to publish if the technology were not available.
The CONVERGENCE CDS can enormously facilitate the use of
semantic technology (an important feature for this market)
CONVERGENCE caching can reduce central requirements for
bandwidth and server resources.
 CONVERGENCE has no commercial organization to market
the CONVERGENCE framework to potential users

W
The lifetime of the CONVERGENCE Consortium is limited to the
lifetime of the project. There is thus no guarantee that the
CONVERGENCE framework will be maintained after the end of
the project.
CONVERGENCE has little time to make itself known to potential
customers
CONVERGENCE is a research project whose goal is to build
prototypes. The implementation of commercial quality products
and services is outside the scope of the project
CONVERGENCE is completely new: users and stakeholders need
time to gain confidence with it.
For technical reasons, some organizations (including ESCoM) may
find it difficult to integrate VDI technology (developed in Java) in
their existing technical environments (e.g. environments based on
Microsoft technology). This will increase the cost of software
development
Even when organizations have developed ontologies they may not
be available in OWL/RDFS format. It will thus be to develop
conversion tools, again increasing the cost of software technology.
CONVERGENCE provides monitoring of VDIs only so long as
they remain within the CONVERGENCE network. When digital
resources are distributed via other channels (facebook, scoop.it,
etc) or through digital audiovisual content aggregators such as You
Tube and Daily Motion Thus users can no longer control their
media content when it is
The applications created for the CONVERGENCE trials do not
provide a complete end-to-end solution for management of video
resources. Users still depend critically on third party software for
a) storing, publishing and sharing videos; b) producing
descriptions/analyses of video materials, c) tracing the way the
materials are used. Providing a complete solution will require a
significant development effort.
In the current market situation, FMSH-ESCoM and users rely on
the CONVERGENCE Consortium to maintain and update the
CONVERGENCE software and the specific application for the
management of video resources

O
Organizations operating on this market need new ways of
protecting their the moral rights of organizations contributing
content and of monitoring use of video resources.
CONVERGENCE offers organizations an opportunity to develop
an integrated set of web services for creating, managing and
exploiting personal and community-centric video channels (i.e.
audiovisual archives) and for archiving audiovisual recordings.
ESCoM-FMSH has the ability to integrate VDI technology in its
existing technical environment providing a convincing
demonstrator for future users..
CONVERGENE will allow ESCoM-FMSH to make its current
ontologies interoperable with ontologies from other sources,
adding to their value
 Deploying the planned service will require significant
investment in hardware, licenses to commercial software, people
etc.

T
VDI technology may be incompatible with future non-VDI
technology offering similar functionality (including technology
offered by big market players)
Future technology may offer better functionality than
CONVERGENCE
CONVERGENCE could lead to an explosion in requests to use
culturally sensitive materials. This could be difficult to manage.
1.4 Networked e-learning platforms
1.4.1 Scenario Description
1.4.1.1 Background
The increasing popularity of information and communication technology has allowed
universities to introduce new forms of e-learning. The LMU Computer Science
department, which developed the “Lecture Podcast Scenario” described in D2.2, has
particular experience in what it calls “lecture podcasts”. These usually consist of
video recordings of a lecture and synchronized slides, and support students during
individual study, allowing them to choose when and at what pace they want to study.
They can also be embedded in web-based systems and enhanced with collaborative
learning features like group-work functionality and annotations, helping to sustain
Web-2.0-style learning communities. Several years of experience have shown that
they are highly popular with students.
From a business point of view, the key point of this scenario is not the specific
functionality it describes – directly tied to the needs and experience of the LMU
Computer Science Department – but the possibility it offers individual university
departments to develop their own e-learning solutions based on its own experience
and needs.
In what follows, we attempt to generalize the scenario for other university
departments with similar needs.
1.4.1.2 Actors
Role
University
University
department
 CDS
Provider
Acronym
or
Service
Role in scenario

Manages a network of students and
lecturers

Provides applications and services to
students and lecturers

Provides ontology-based services
supporting lecturers and students
during
o The creation of Resource
VDIs
(videos,
slides,
podcasts)
o The creation of P-VDIs
(definition of meta-data)

The creation of S-VDIs

Provides
services
allowing
CONVERGENCE peers to match
subscriptions to:
o E-learning content
o Student annotations to elearning content
 CoApp
Technology Provider
 License
Provider

Lecturer
Service

CoApp TP
 Provides
Applications
Convergence technology

 Creates licenses for
content and annotations
LSP
using
e-learning
 Creates and publishes lecture
material in the Convergence Network

Grants rights to:
o E-learning Service to provide
learning material
o Students to download and
play e-learning content
o Others to reuse
material
under
conditions (e.g.
common licenses)

 Ontology
Technology Provider


learning
certain
creative
Advertises e-learning content
 Creates and sends user ontologies to
CDSP
OTP
 Subscribe to, download e-learning
content, watch streamed e-learning
content
Students
Subscribe to, read and reply
annotations by other students.
to
Advertise when
annotation
an
they
publish
The scenario involves three distinct activities, all supported by CONVERGENCE:
content creation, content distribution and content augmentation.
1.4.1.3 Content creation
CONVERGENCE allows Content Creators to annotate and define license rights to
VDIs, to assemble them into higher level units representing learning modules and
publish them
to a selected groups of users (potentially to the whole
CONVERGENCE network). The details of this process depend on organizational
decisions within individual universities. In some cases, publication may be handled at
the departmental level, in others it could be managed centrally.
1.4.1.4 Content Distribution
CONVERGENCE allows a departmental or central service to collect learning content
from lecturers and to make it available to students (via web services, web download,
etc.).
User 1
Lecturer
User 2

Central
Description

Lecturer posts content to an internal
service,
university website.
departmental
service
(elearning
service)

Students
 Central
service,
departmental
service
 The e-learning service integrates the
lecturer’s content in a learning module (in the
LMU case a podcast) and makes the module
available on its website.
 Students download the module or watch it
through a streaming service
1.4.1.5 Content Annotation – Feedback to Lecturers
Students annotate materials, initiating a collaborative learning process. Lecturers use
student feedback to revise content (eliminate mistakes, improve presentation quality)

User 2
Description

Students
 Students annotate learning materials for use
by other students
User 1
Students

Students

Students
 Students reply to each other’s annotations,
initiating a collaborative learning process

Lecturer

Students
 Lecturers improve their materials based on
feedback from students.
1.4.2 Market analysis
1.4.2.1 Market segmentation
The e-learning market can be divided into three main segments12:
12

E2E: services for universities and university professors and their students. A
good example is WebCT.com (www.webct.com). WebCT's main business is
providing web packages that allow faculty to develop, deliver and administer
web-based courses;

E2B: services from universities and other organizations that provide webbased training courses to the corporate market.
Seufert, S. E-Learning Business Models. Framework and Best Practice Examples. In: Cases on
Worldwide E-Commerce, (2001), 70-94.

E2C: learning services targeting adults who are not students but who are
interested in improving their education
In what follows we will focus on the E2E market. However, the results of our analysis
will show that CONVERGENCE can also provide universities with an effective
means of reaching the E2B and the E2C markets
1.4.2.2 Conditions for the success of university e-learning solutions
E-learning has many advantages for universities. It helps them to differentiate
themselves from their competitors, and expands their geographical reach, helping
them to build a national and international reputation. It attracts categories of student
(students who are not able to attend university full-time, for financial or other reasons;
students with children etc.), which are not adequately served by more traditional
models. It can also serve as an information tool, helping prospective students to
understand the university’s offering and make appropriate choices about where to
enroll. E-learning can also help universities to reduce costs – allowing lecturers to reuse learning materials created by their colleagues. Some forms of e-learning – such as
the podcasts described in the original user scenario - can help to improve
communication within the student community. If e-learning modules are freely
accessible to the public they can also facilitate communication among students from
different universities and countries.
If an e-learning service is to achieve these goals it has to meet a number of conditions:

The cost of developing, managing and updating the service should feasible for
the organization delivering the service (usually a central or departmental elearning service)

The service has to be highly visible to prospective users

The service should reflect the specific goals and experience of this
organization

The service should be used – not simply to “deliver” content – but to
encourage dialog and collaborative learning

Learning content should be continuously updated and outdated materials
removed from the system

Students should be aware when new content becomes available

The university should be able to monitor and protect the use of learning
materials (
CONVERGENCE will make it easier for universities and university departments to
achieve these goals. However, CONVERGENCE (or other solutions based on
information-centric networking) could also offer much more than this, helping to
transform the nature of the university market for e-learning.
1.4.2.3 E-learning for universities: an immature market
Commercial suppliers have been promoting products and services for e-learning
since the early 1980s and in some sectors (e.g. training services for the corporate
sector and for the public administration, language learning for the consumer market)
have succeeded in winning a significant market share. However, the characteristics of
university e-learning are different. While commercial suppliers sell services to large
numbers of individual and corporate customers, most universities, their services
exclusively for their own students. With small user populations the resources
dedicated to development have been limited. In many cases, learning materials are
developed by individual lecturers and distributed through web servers, designed and
maintained on an ad hoc basis. Relatively few universities have a dedicated
department for the development and delivery of e-learning services. Production values
are often low. This situation contrasts with the market for traditional textbooks, which
are developed by professional publishers, with heavy capital investment and sold to
large numbers of students in many different universities. In this sense, therefore, the
e-learning market is immature.
The immediate reason for the immature status of the e-learning market is low
investment by publishers. This, however, is linked to the intrinsic nature of university
eLearning.
A modern e-learning service does not simply deliver learning materials (as a library
delivers textbook) – it offers a complete learning environment. This is universities’
core business. Therefore, very naturally, they wish to develop and manage their own
services. The result is a series of unconnected “islands”, each running its own
learning platform. The majority of these platforms support standards such as SCORM
or IMS Common Cartridge. This makes it relatively easy for universities (and
individual lecturers) to re-use material developed for one platform in another platform
(e.g. when migrating between platforms). In reality, however, this kind of re-use is
rare.
The main obstacle to creating a larger market for learning materials is access. Today,
the only way for a lecturer or a student to learn about materials produced by another
institution is to know the URL of the platform, obtain credentials to use the platform
(which is often impossible), login and search for the materials using the tools
provided by the platform (different in each case).
In recent years, American universities and commercial companies have begun to
realize that this is a major limitation. For example, the MIT Open Courseware
Initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) offers free open courseware for a world-wide
target population and Apple has recently introduced a special iTunes service to help
universities distribute their courseware (see below). To date, however, the majority of
European universities have failed to launch equivalent initiatives. The majority do not
collaborate in the production of learning materials, and do not make their materials
available to students and lecturers from other institutions. This decreases their ability
to compete on what is rapidly becoming a global academic marketplace and limits
their ability to offer services to the E2B and E2C markets.
1.4.2.4 Competing solutions
1.4.2.4.1 Different classes of solution
The last twenty years have seen an enormous proliferation of e-learning solutions.
Some consist of platforms allowing a university or a commercial organization to
offers its own e-learning services; some are services operated directly by a university
or offered to the university by a third party organization. Some platforms are available
as freeware. In others, universities buy platforms from commercial organizations or
pay a commercial service to operate a platform on their behalf.
Virtual learning environments
Universities wishing to provide e-learning students can choose between a wide range
of commercial and non-commercial platforms, many of which offer features similar to
those demonstrated in the CONVERGENCE user scenario. Many support SCORM
and other standards. To date, however, there has been no attempt to connect different
platforms in a single network.
Below, we briefly describe a few typical examples of current commercial and noncommercial offerings.

Blackboard Learn, BlackBoard Collaborate, Blackboard Mobile. These
platforms, designed respectively for course management, video and audio
conferencing, and “mobile e-learning” are developed by Blackboard – a
company which has been selling eLearning solutions since the late 1990s.
Although Blackboard software is proprietary, developers are able to extend the
functionality of the system, and create customized course management and
delivery by developing software and applications known as Building Blocks.
In November 2010, Blackboard applications were certified by the IMS Global
Learning Consortium to allow instructors and others to share education
content and resources across different systems.In 2011, Blackboard launched
CourseSites, a free version of its Blackboard Learn and Collaborate software,
for which it provides hosting and support.

Moodle [http://moodle.org/]
o Moodle is an open source course management system, used by many
universities and institutions. As of December 2011 Moodle had a user
base of 72,177 registered and verified sites, serving 57,112,671 users
in 5.8 million courses. The open source nature of the system has
facilitated the development of plugins offering a range of interactive
functionality, e.g. podcasting modules. However, the platform often
fails to meet student expectations in terms of Quality of Experience.
For instance, chat functionality is significantly worse than on programs
such as Skype, Windows Messenger etc. Many management functions
are difficult to use.

MITx [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html]
o In December 2011, MIT announced the launch of an interactive learning
platform called MITx. The platform enriches selected MIT courses with
new interactive features to enhance student-to-student-communication.

Unterrichtsmitschau 2.0 [http://videoonline.edu.lmu.de/]
o Unterrichtsmitschau 2.0 is an online learning environment with interactive
features, allowing students to watch video recordings of lectures with
synchronized slides and to augment the lectures with annotations

Social VirtPresenter [http://www.socialvirtpresenter.de/]
o Social VirtPresenter is a service from the University of Osnabrück. The
system uses Facebook as an application platform and includes interactive
features such as comments, discussion forums and chats.

Khan Academy [http://www.khanacademy.org/]
o Khan Acadamy is a non-profit organization, which provides educational
content to users for free. A commenting function allows students and
teachers to ask and answer questions
Services for the distribution of educational content

iTunes U [http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/]
o iTunes U is a distribution system that allows universities to publish
educational content. Students access the content using the iTunes
application on their computers or mobile device. Like CONVERGENCE,
the service, is based on a publish-subscribe model. Students are notified
when new podcast episodes are available. However, the only way they can
do this is by be using iTunes software. Another problem is that iTunes
provides no protection for copyrighted materials once they have been
downloaded. iTunes provides no functionality for collaborative discussion
of educational content.
Many universities provide eLearning services, often just for their own students but
sometimes targeting a broader audience. Course materials are often published
under a creative commons license. However the license is not embedded in the
learning resource. In general, these services do not provide facilities for student
annotation of courseware or for discussions among students. Here we describe
two typical examples.

MIT OpenCourseWare
o MIT OpenCourseWare is a service provided by MIT, which offers
students various course Materials, ranging from lecture notes to podcasts.
The educational content is under the creative common license and MIT’s
terms of use. Licensing information is available on the MIT website but is
not directly bound to specific educational resources.

OpenLearnWare [http://www.e-learning.tu-darmstadt.de/openlearnware/]
o The technical university of Darmstadt offers audio podcasts to its students
and other interested users under a creative common license. Licensing
information is available on the university website but is not directly bound
to specific educational resources.
1.4.3 Weaknesses of current solutions
13

Current solutions make it extremely difficult for publishers, universities or
individual lecturers to address a market extending beyond a single university.
This limits the budget available for the development of new learning materials
with negative effects on production values

Current services provide no way of bundling licenses with learning materials,
no way of enforcing licenses and no way of monitoring the way learning
materials are used. These technological limitations are a strong incentive to
operate eLearning platforms as “closed systems” with the disadvantages
mentioned earlier. For the same reason, most universities do not expose their
eLearning materials to external search engines.

Commercial platforms for the delivery of eLearning services are often
extremely expensive and were designed for use in a corporate environment.

Non-commercial platforms (such as Moodle) often fail to provide the Quality
of Experience users have grown to expect

“Home grown” solutions developed by individual universities or university
departments also offer insufficient quality and are expensive to maintain. It is
very difficult for universities to stay up to date with emerging technologies.

Most professionally operated services are based on a waterfall development
cycle in which authors release learning materials to a department responsible
for service delivery. This makes it difficult for authors to revise materials in
response to student feedback.

No current system provides a mechanism to automatically distributed revised
versions of downloaded learning materials13

The majority of current services offer only very simple means of searching for
resources. None make systematic use of ontologies. None allow searches over
multiple platforms. None allow students to take one item of learning material
Obviously learning materials made available as web pages can always be updated.
as a prototype and search for similar materials Very few provide a mechanism
for notifying users of new resources when they become available.

The majority of current systems provide a single channel of delivery (usually
the web, sometimes mobile devices). Very few allow users to access the same
material using different devices of different categories.

Some current systems support discussions among students. However, very few
provide a generic mechanism for discussing any kind of learning material

No current systems provide mechanisms to support student privacy
(pseudonymous comments, digital forgetting)
1.4.4 Market requirements, products and services
1.4.4.1 Networked e-learning platforms: market requirements
On the basis of the market analysis presented in the previous paragraphs we believes
there exists a genuine market opportunity for the creation of CONVERGENCE-based
e-learning platforms, serving the needs of individual universities and university
departments and networked, via CoNET to other, CONVERGENCE-based platforms
managed by other, universities and departments. Such platforms would allow faculty
to use learning materials from academic publishers and other universities in their
courses, while still managing their courses according to their own policies and
criteria. In other words, CONVERGENCE could help to create a market for
eLearning materials similar to the current market for textbooks. The new market
would create new incentives for publishers to invest in the creation of high quality
learning materials encouraging demand from faculty and students.
Specific market requirements to be met by the new platforms include the following:

No licensing fees; no restrictions on use

Unlimited possibilities for designing custom platforms

The possibility of publishing eLearning materials to a network of universities
and students

The possibility of bundling learning materials with a license specifying who
can use the materials under what conditions

The possibility of enforcing these conditions

The possibility of systematically tracing the way learning materials are used

The possibility for students and faculty to search for elearning materials
anywhere on a network of universities and publishers

Simple search mechanisms

The possibility for faculty to rapidly update and revise learning materials

The possibility of delivering learning materials to different classes of device
(PCs, mobile devices, pads) without extra development effort

Protection for student privacy
1.4.4.2 Products and services
In the scenario considered here, different universities and departments would deploy
different platforms, each reflecting their specific needs and strategies. Some might
focus on podcasts (as in the original LMU user scenario); some might focus on video
lectures and video seminars; others might deliver learning materials through web
pages, or through interactive tools (models, simulations, exercises); many would use
mixes of these strategies. As in the LMU scenario, many CONVERGENCE-based
platforms would be nothing more than enhanced versions of existing platforms, with
new CONVERGENCE-enabled capabilities. What they would all have in common
would be CONVERGENCE middleware and the use of the CONVERGENCE
network. The CoNET would enable networking among different platforms. The
middleware would provide access to the network and to other CONVERGENCE
functionality, satisfying the needs listed in the previous paragraph.
1.4.5 Deployment of CONVERGENCE platforms
Inevitably the first deployment of a CONVERGENCE-based eLearning platform
would involve a single university, or, more probably, a single university department,
like the LMU computer science department. The deployment requirements for such
an implementation would be similar to those described in the previous scenarios and
do not require further discussion. All technological and organizational support would
be supplied by a single organization. Investment would be relatively limited.
However, the most interesting aspect of the scenario is the possibility of creating a
network of platforms. Such a network could initially be created within a single
university – possibly as a result of informal collaboration between members of faculty
and departments. Once such collaboration was established it would be easy to
centralize specialist functions such as identity services, license services, and content
delivery. Such a policy would fit nicely with university strategies for centralized
provision of IT services, and could lead to significant cost savings and improvements
in quality.
A second more difficult step would be to establish inter-university collaborations,
probably beginning with collaborations among colleagues who are already used to
working together (e.g. departments that collaborate in common research projects).
Thanks to the CoMid and the CoNET the creation of such networks would require
zero investment in network or server capacity (apart from the investment required to
establish a single network). Where universities serve the same geographical area,
CONVERGENCE caching might also allow some savings in capacity. 14 The creation
14
ELearning services are potentially vulnerable to strong peaks in demand at the start of term and in
exam periods. Caching could reduce the cost of the infrastructure required to handle these peaks.
of inter-university networks would create opportunities for a division of labor among
the participant universities (e.g. in the provision of identity, licensing and CDS
services).
The final step would be to extend the network to publishers and to other potential
users of universities eLearning services. Each participant in such a network would
install one or more CONVERGENCE peers, providing rapid access to
CONVERGENCE to its own users (and perhaps to other users in the same
geographical area. Such an extension of the network would create further
opportunities for the emergence of specialized service providers.
1.4.6 Business models
1.4.6.1 Overview
In the previous section, we described the gradual evolution of a CONVERGENCEbased network of eLearning platforms, beginning with an intra-university (interdepartmental) network and ending with a full CONVERGENCE eco-system,
including multiple universities and university departments, publishers, businesses,
consumers and (possibly) specialist providers of CONVERGENCE-related services.
Each of these steps requires different business models
1.4.6.2 An intra-university network
The purpose of an intra-university network would be to provide services to faculty
and students. The cost of the service would be covered by normal departmental
budgets and/or central university resources. Students and faculty would access the
service free of charge. In some accounting systems one department might pay for
services provided by another department. However any such transfers would be
purely notional. In early stages of deployment it would probably be advisable to avoid
all charges, thereby encouraging new departments to use the service and reducing
transaction costs.
1.4.6.3 An inter-university network
It is likely that in an initial configuration, each participant would cover its own costs
for infrastructure and management. As in an intra-university, network students and
faculty would access the network free of charge. In the initial period of operation,
charges for the use of learning materials would probably not be advisable, as they
would give rise to heavy administration costs, and create disincentives for use of the
network. However, if universities began to make heavy use of content developed by
other universities, it would be useful to introduce a royalties system.
CONVERGENCE licensing and ERR would provide an ideal technical basis for such
a system, which would give universities an incentive to increase their investment in
the creation of new materials. Other revenue flows might be generated if one
university provided specialist services (e.g. identification services, licensing, CDS
services) to other services on the network. Here again, it would probably be best to
not charge for services until volume of business was sufficient to justify the
administrative costs.
1.4.6.4 A full CONVERGENCE eco-system
1.4.6.4.1 Universities
In a full CONVERGENCE eco-system universities would continue to supply services
to students and each other in the same way as in an inter-university network. However
they could also use the system to serve the E2B and E2C segments of the market

In the E2B segment, universities could use the CONVERGENCE network to
advertise and deliver specialist education services to corporate and
government organizations, regardless of their physical location (potentially on
national and international markets). The CONVERGENCE network would
provide such organizations with an easy way of finding and accessing such
services. As at present, service delivery would be based on special contracts
between the university and the businesses concerned, and could provide a
valuable addition to university revenues.

In the E2C segment, universities could use the CONVERGENCE to provide
services for adult education. According to the policy of the university and
relevant legislation such services could be provided free of charge (as in the
case of MITx) or for payment. Free services could help universities to build
large social learning communities around their services, including
international students They would also allow universities to analyze user
subscriptions – acquiring valuable knowledge of user preferences and
interests.
As suggested by Mendling et al. 15 some of the cost could be covered by
advertising – for instance for books. This would make it necessary to
maximize the number of students using the environment – hence the number
of views/clicks/sells - and to carefully target advertisements to users.
CONVERGENCE would make it easier for universities to achieve these goals:
Universities could also consider the possibility of tiered pricing systems in
which it would offer users a basic package of free services (which could serve
as a marketing tool) while charging for premium services. However, this
solution has the disadvantage that users might all opt for the basic service. An
alternative option might be to introduce a micropayment-based system
In D9.3 we will consider the advantages and disadvantages of these options.
15
See Mendling et al. (2005).
1.4.6.4.2 Publishers
Another beneficiary of a full CONVERGENCE eco-system would be publishers who
could develop high quality eLearning materials and market them through the
CONVERGENCE network. Possible business models include

Direct sales of materials to faculty and students (as with text-books)

Licensing of materials to universities, who would make them accessible to all
students and faculty (as with electronic journal subscriptions)
1.4.6.4.3 Other beneficiaries
A mature CONVERGENCE ecosystem would provide opportunities for other
organizations, to provide paying services to universities, and publishers. The main
such beneficiaries would be:

Application developers developing
platforms and related tools

Systems developers developing improved implementations of CoMID and
CONet services

License service providers supporting the licensing and monitoring the use of
valuable educational content

Security solution providers, helping universities and publishers to maintain the
security of their systems

CDS service providers, offering support for the development of new
ontologies, the conversion of existing ones, and the delivery of ontology-based
services
CONVERGENCE-based
learning
1.4.7 SWOT analysis
Player
SWOT Analysis
 A network of CONVERGENCE-based learning
platforms would allow sharing of learning materials
among universities, increasing the size of the market and
providing incentives to create high quality materials
University
University
Department
or

S
The CONVERGENCE framework is a standards-based
solution available free of charge
CONVERGENCE allows universities and university
departments to develop platforms exactly matching their
needs
The CONVERGENCE framework provides an easy
migration path for existing solutions
CONVERGENCE reduces the cost of developing and
operating new platforms
CONVERGENCE has strong, easily scalable technology
CONVERGENCE allows universities to define and
enforce licensing conditions and to monitor the use of the
learning materials they distribute
The CONVERGENCE CDS facilitates the annotation of
learning materials and makes it easier for users to find
learning materials meeting their requirements
CONVERGENCE allows students to “subscribe” to
learning materials meeting their interests, and to receive
automatic notifications every time new or modified
materials become available.
CONVERGENCE provides an easy mechanism to keep
learning materials up to date
CONVERGENCE caching can reduce central
requirements for bandwidth and server resources.
 CONVERGENCE has no commercial organization to
market the framework as a solution for eLearning
The lifetime of the CONVERGENCE Consortium is
limited to the lifetime of the project. There is no
guarantee that the CONVERGENCE framework will be
maintained after the end of the project.

W
CONVERGENCE has little time to make itself known to
potential customers
CONVERGENCE is a research project whose goal is to
build prototypes. The implementation of commercial
quality products and services is outside the scope of the
project
CONVERGENCE is completely new: universities and
publishers need time to gain confidence with it.
There are already many eLearning platforms available on
the market. Many universities have invested in the
development of their own platforms.
One of the main advantages of CONVERGENCE is that
enable cooperation within and between universities. This
is always desirable. However, it is often difficult to
achieve in practice.
The world economical crisis has reduced consumer
buying power, reducing the attractiveness of paying
services for the E2B and E2C segments.
 CONVERGENCE elementary services makes it easy
to develop small scale systems with limited investment

O
CONVERGENCE creates new opportunities
collaboration inside and between universities
for
Early adoption of CONVERGENCE could enhance
Universities image towards prospective students.
Even if CONVERGENCE reduces the cost of deploying
a new learning platform, this will still require significant
investment in software development, hardware, licenses
to commercial software, people etc.
Large players may introduce their own solutions which
preclude market entry for newcomers
CONVERGENCE may not prove credible to the
University market

CONVERGENCE may not have the commercial strength
to successfully market its solution .
T
Students and faculty may not be willing to use the
collaborative capabilities provided by CONVERGENCE
CONVERGENCE works best when metadata is carefully
defined. This requires dedicated staff.
Effective definition of metadata requires high quality
ontologies to describe learning materials. Such ontologies
do not currently exist. Creating them will require
significant effort.