In what is believed to be the first deployment of its kind in SA, Knowledge Focus - with help from its consortium partners IBM and IMOS -- has installed a multilingual multimedia information storage and retrieval system at The National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (NEMISA) in Johannesburg.
NEMISA is a broadcast and multimedia training institute set up by the Department of Communication as a skills development institution. NEMISA`s vision is to be the preferred specialist training institute, focusing on the innovative use of digital media technology tools for content developers on the African continent in the 21st Century.
As such, NEMISA had a requirement to not only store but also easily retrieve information which is currently in a number of different formats: paper, video, microfilm, electronic office files, audio files and photographs.
The system installed by Knowledge Focus enables students and staff to store and retrieve information from various sources, and is able to do so using the 11 official South African languages with great accuracy.
Lynda Cassiem, Information Co-ordinator at NEMISA, says: "We will be able to retrieve information on the basis of location, title, full text, pattern recognition and any other indexed metadata. The system is so advanced that one is able to simultaneously search over indexed video frames, images, electronic and audio files as well as paper documents which have been scanned in."
The NEMISA students are in the process of being trained in the art of producing multimedia products and will be able to animate Web sites, produce company training videos and record company experts talking about their experiences as a product of that company`s knowledge or organisational memory.
The Multimedia Information Storage and Retrieval system is a solution offered by Knowledge Focus and its consortium partners IBM and IMOS. The system combines the multimedia functions of Convera Screening Room and RetrievalWare (for which Knowledge Focus holds master distributor status in SADC countries), the document management tools of IBM`s Content Manager and a library management system from Inmagic.
Knowledge Focus under took the integration work to make the three systems work together and MD Piet Dempsey says because the Convera products convert the information sources into binary code, rather than relying purely on Boolean or other search protocols, the error rate in searches is reduced.
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