Waisda? is a Web application that provides a multiplayer video labeling game. It is based on the principles of the ESP image labeling game coined by Louis von Ahn, where two or more users compete with each other by entering tags. In Waisda? players score points by entering the same tag as one of the other players in a ten second interval. As a result each video that is played in the game is annotated with tags that are anchored to a time point in the video.
Waisda? was initiated by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the VU University Amsterdam in the context of the Dutch project Images for the Future and the European research project PrestoPRIME. The software was pioneered in two pilots using historic archive material as well as recent TV episodes from Dutch broadcasters (KRO and NCRV). The two pilots together resulted in more than a million tags de-scribing thousands of videos.
An open source version of Waisda? enables maintainers of an online video collection to start their own crowdsourcing initiative for time-based annotations.

 

Credits:

Direction, editing and audio: Sebastiaan ter Burg.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision safeguards more than 800.,000 hours of television, radio, music and film from 1898 to today, and collects, preserves and opens this audiovisual heritage for as many users as possible: media professionals, education, science and the general public.

Images for the Future is a large-scale digitisation project in which four organisations have a large part of the audiovisual heritage of the Netherland through preservation and digitisation. The digitised materials are made as broadly available as possible for education and the general public.

The Web & Media group at the VU University Amsterdam investigates storages, linking, enrichment and access to heterogeneous data sources on the Web. Research topics include knowledge and ontology engineering, semantic enrichment, semantic search, interactive and personalized access, visualization paradigms and provenance tracking.

PrestoPRIME researched and developed practical solutions for the long-term preservation of digital media objects, programmes and collections, and tried to find ways to increase access by integrating the media archives with European online digital libraries in a digital preservation framework.