Caliph and Emir / News: Recent posts

The new release of Caliph & Emir 0.9.16 brings some major changes under the hood for Emir: The retrieval of graph based semantic information is now powered by a path index implemented with Lucene. Anonymous (wildcard) nodes are allowed, they can be used by typing an * as a node label in the graph query editor. In the result list images can be previewed by clicking on the thumbnails. The installers GUI is now more neat (and orange) and checks if Java is installed. The windows launchers now have icons and the 2-dimensional visualization has been tweaked a bit to look smoother. Additionally libraries were updated and log4j was added.

As I hope that further developer will join the team I activated the CVS repository for Caliph & Emir. Using the module "development" interested viewers will find all sources along with all icons, the installation script and the ant build file. For the CVS release a major refactorment of the packages was done to fix some naming issues. Additionally a HAC based clustering algorithm was included. I just have to check its validity then I will use it to cluster Emir's result lists.

After studying the logfiles I realized that most people downloaded the fully featured version of Caliph & Emir which includes the Java runtime. So I released the newest version with the runtime.

Caliph and Emir allow in v0.9.15 the multidimensional scaling of annotated images and the visualization of the results based on color and edge information and based on semantic graph comparison in two ways using FastMap and Force Directed Placement. See the screenshots for more details. Another feature is the simplification of the indexing process by an indexing wizard, accessed through the menu. Caliph has got a new file and directory browser based on a tree, similar to windows explorer or konqueror.

Just now I released a new version of Caliph & Emir. Changes include several bugfixes (e.g. in file tree in Caliph), a new indexing wizard dialog in Emir (see menu there) and an enancement for the repository visualization based on graph similarities using an additional more precise and appealing MS algorithm called "Force Directed Placement", which is quite the same concept as Spring Embedding. Try this one out with the new test data set - its great :)... read more

As previously mentioned: As part of the I-Know '05, the 5th International Conference for Knowledge Management, a Special Track on "Knowledge Discovery and Semantic Technologies 2005" takes place:
http://www.know-center.at/en/conference/i-know05/KDaST-cfp.htm

Yesterday the deadline for submissions has been extended to 7th Feb. 2005.

As I'm one of the organizers of the special track I'm promoting the CfP here at Caliph's site and I'd welcome contributions! ... read more

After some sf.net related problem in file release system I upped another new version of C&E.

The version numbers of Caliph and Emir were merged because Emir reached a stable and mature state. From now on both programs ship under the same flag.

New features:
* Caliph got a file tree instead of file table
* Emir: Indexing moved to menu
* Emir: Fast 2D Visualization of repositories added
* Emir: retrieval & graph edit bugfixes ... read more

Today I released a new version of Caliph & Emir. While Caliph remains (more or less) unchanged, Emir now allows to create query for semantic graphs visually, based on a query expansion mechanism and regular expressions. Please do not forget to recreate your index after installing, the index changed to a new format to support future move away from regex based flat file retrieval.

By the way the paper deadline for KDaST'05 is coming closer: http://www.know-center.at/en/conference/i-know05/KDaST.htm... read more

As part of the I-Know '05, the 5th International Conference for Knowledge Management, a Special Track on "Knowledge Discovery and Semantic Technologies 2005" takes place:
http://www.know-center.at/en/conference/i-know05/KDaST-cfp.htm

As I'm one of the organizers of the special track I'm promoting the CfP here at Caliph's site and I'd welcome contributions!

cu there eventually,
Mathias

http://www.know-center.at/en/conference/i-know05/KDaST-cfp.htm

As sf.net offers a new service with publishing screenshot on the project summary I took 6 of these and posted them to allow users to gain an impression on Caliph & Emir.

Recently a major update on Caliph and Emir was released. Caliph & Emir are MPEG-7 based Java prototypes for digital photo and image annotation and retrieval supporting graph like annotation for semantic metadata and content based image retrieval using MPEG-7 descriptors.

Source and binaries can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/caliph-emir.

Features of Caliph and Emir include, but are not limited to: Automatic extraction of IPTC and EXIF metadata and conversion to MPEG-7, automatic extraction of CBIR descriptors, visual semantic description editor and index based search and retrieval of text and semantic annotations. For a more comprehensive list of features visit http://caliph-emir.sourceforge.net/, there you will also find two short flash videos showing how to use Caliph and Emir.... read more

Released new versions with minor changes, visually the interface changed a lot, I moved to the Look & Feel of Java 1.5. Additionally I included a HowTo for creating annotations as the usage of Caliph looks a bit confusing the first time.

Caliph 0.9.12:
- changed layout to JRE 1.5 default
- turned confirmation for overwriting off
- added button for extraction of agent names from semantic
descriptions to structured description
- disabled splash screen after first "agree"
Emir 0.8.4:
- changed layout to JRE 1.5 default
- added progress information for indexing in statusbar
- introduced interface for statusbars
- disabled splash screen after first "agree"
- changed name of RetrievalEngineFacotry to RetrievalEngineFactory :)

Thanks to my patience I found everything I needed to create a simple installer: JSmotth provided the wrappers for starting Caliph & Emir, NSIS let me build this nice little .exe installer.

Much fun! :)

- motte

Today I released a new version of Emir including major changes like the integration of Lucene for searching. All the features of Emir are very very beta - a new retrieval tool is already planned, but I've got to find a time slot for implementing this. Perhaps I will do some MPEG-7 retrieval within my PhD - The Role of Metadata in Knowledge Discovery - so I've at at least a reason to work on this. If someone wants to help me: There are numerous things that want to be fixed and implemented!... read more

As I'm going to show Caliph & Emir at the CODATA in November in Berlin, Germany I've updated the Visualization of semantic graphs: Now it is painted with anti-aliasing (now possible as I'm not developing any more with my old notebook :) and you can arrange the nodes animated with the famous and old Spring Embedding algorithm (right hand side mouse click and choose "embed"). A second change is that the import of javax.media classes has been stripped, because it is not needed for still images. From now on only Java 1.5 is supported. This is because I'm programming with generics quite some time now using the public beta from sun and I think that everybody should use them - they are great (along with autoboxing they are superb)!

Today I received a code donation from project VizIR from Vienna, Austria, which I already integrated in Caliph & Emir. Images can now be indexed and searched using the MPEG-7 Descriptor "EdgeHistogram". Special THX goes to Horst Eidenberger, who was so kind to send me the code. See also http://vizir.ims.tuwien.ac.at/

For simplifying the installation process I added an installer today :) just to start the resulting jar with "java -jar"

Recently added feature in Caliph v0.9.7: Support for storing and loading StructuredAnnotation elements in MPEG-7. StructuredAnnotation allows a user to define via text input a "Who", "Where", "When", ... description using 7 different MPEG-7 descriptors. This sort of description is not as powerful as the semantic description but it is easier to handle.

I'm proud to announce the first release of Caliph & Emir as open source software under GPL license.

- motte