10 Years of a Scientific Video Platform: The History of the TIB AV-Portal from its Beginnings to the Present from a Development Perspective
The TIB AV-Portal celebrates its tenth anniversary on 29 April 2024. Since its launch, the portal has developed into a central platform for scientific videos and has steadily gained in importance in the academic community. The TIB has undergone a significant change in the management of the portal, in that it has evolved from a client and creator of requirements to an active implementer and operator. In addition, numerous services related to the AV-Portal were established at the TIB, which considerably expanded the range of services.
As a long-time companion of the project since 2013, I have been able to witness the impressive evolution of the portal at close quarters. In this blog article, I would like to provide a detailed insight into the development history of the portal from its beginnings to the present day.
The AV-Portal as the KNM’s first project
In 2010, the Competence Center for Non-Textual Materials (KNM) was established at the TIB after receiving a positive assessment from a special evaluation by the Leibniz Association. The aim of the competence center was to develop and operate infrastructures, tools and services for multimedia objects that improve the retrieval, searching and citation of these objects.
The KNM’s first project was the development of the TIB AV-Portal. This ambitious project aimed to develop an innovative video portal that would provide web-based access to scientific videos. The range of content included simulations, experiments, interviews, video abstracts, lectures and conferences – primarily from the fields of natural sciences and technology. It was also intended that the videos could be linked to further research information such as scientific articles, research data and persistent identifiers of academic authors. In order to understand and fulfill the user needs for such a video portal, the KNM conducted extensive expert interviews, environment analyses and focus groups in 2010.
Development of the portal until the launch in April 2014
The KNM (later renamed Lab Non-Textual Materials) developed the AV-Portal from July 2011 to April 2014 in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering. During this phase, various video analyses were integrated, including shot detection, video OCR, visual concept detection and automatic video annotation. The graphical user interface was designed according to the user needs that emerged from the TIB’s requirements analysis.
An authorization layer ensured that access to certain films was restricted in order to protect copyright or personal rights. FlowWorks’ Flow Center was used as the media management system. In addition, interfaces and workflows were created to integrate automatically generated language transcripts and digital object identifiers (DOIs) into the system and to export metadata and video files to the digital long-term archiving system.
At the same time, the TIB set up numerous services for video management. These initially included DOI registration, long-term archiving, metadata management, video acquisition, rights clearance and licensing consulting. After three years of intensive development work, the AV-Portal went online on 29 April 2014. A highlight of the launch was the cross-lingual retrieval, which made it possible to search the content in both German and English.
The development of the AV-Portal over the years can be illustrated more clearly using a few images. The following wireframe from 2011 is an example of the first sketch of the basic structure and layout of the user interface. Wireframes are usually the first steps in the design process and are used to visualize ideas before the actual development and programming takes place.
When the AV-Portal officially went online in April 2014, it was presented in a gray-blue design. The homepage was predominantly static and focused on text and images. Interactive content for exploration was only sparsely represented at that time.
Redesign of the AV-Portal for the TIB foundation in January 2016
When the TIB became a foundation in January 2016, the AV-Portal underwent a comprehensive redesign of its screen design. This revision not only included an optimization of the interactive elements according to usability criteria, but also the introduction of a responsive design that automatically adapts to different screen sizes and device types. Since then, the TIB AV-Portal has been presented in a color scheme of red, white and grey. Despite these changes, the portal’s homepage has remained largely static.
Integrating the portal into our own infrastructure
In September 2018, the Scrum team AV-Portal was founded at the TIB – with the goal of migrating the individual components of the AV-Portal, which were previously hosted by external providers, to the in-house infrastructure and developing them independently from then on. The team consists of four developers, a product owner and a scrum master. The first milestone was the migration of the frontend, including the search function and the graphical user interface, in 2019. The following year, the team completed the migration of the backend, which includes the video analyses. Since then, the Scrum team has been able to implement all requirements internally in both the frontend and the backend.
The in-house development of the AV-Portal led to a significantly faster and more efficient further development of the platform. A key factor in this success is the close collaboration between the Scrum team and TIB’s internal stakeholders. In monthly sprint reviews, the team presents the latest implementations to its stakeholders and collects valuable feedback. This feedback often flows directly into the next development phase and thus contributes to the continuous improvement of the portal.
In 2020, the Scrum team completely restructured the homepage of the AV-Portal. Various video categories were introduced, such as New content and Recommendations based on your viewing activity. These categories are updated automatically and therefore always offer users current and interesting content. In addition, the team has made it possible for the portal’s editorial team to create their own categories to highlight current topics and content. Blog articles and news from the TIB’s social media have also been integrated into the homepage and information tiles about the services and offers of the AV-Portal have been added. These features offer users a dynamic and interactive experience when browsing the content.
The following image shows the upper part of the portal’s revised homepage.
Milestones in development since 2018
The Scrum team has implemented numerous other requirements in recent years. Here is a small excerpt:
• Integration of frontend and backend in a Kubernetes cluster
• Scaling the frontend
• Creation of all video formats
• Introduction of series as a new media type
• Provision of a separate space for publishers
• Revision of the search function, including an update to SolrCloud
• Extension of synonyms to all subject areas
• Implementation of a new video player
• Video subtitling and targeted search in the transcript (Whisper)
• Translation of non-English videos into English (Whisper)
• Migration to a new frontend framework (Vue.js)
More detailed information can be found in the various blog articles on the further development of the AV-Portal.
Current focus of development
The team is currently concentrating on delivering the videos via TIB servers and implementing adaptive streaming using MPEG-DASH. At the same time, the frontend is being converted to Nuxt, which is based on Vue.js. Vue.js enables a more seamless user experience, as it eliminates the need to completely reload the page when navigating and instead dynamically updates only the relevant parts of the page. Nuxt.js extends Vue.js with server-side rendering, which improves search engine optimization, performance and loading times of the portal – especially with large video content. Finally, the Scrum team is working closely with TIB’s Visual Analytics research group to extend the labeling of visual concepts based on a open clip model.
Since the launch of the AV-Portal in 2014, the TIB has become increasingly independent of external service providers. This independence is to be further expanded in the coming years. In addition to portal development, other services have been established at the TIB in recent years, such as the conference recording service TIB ConRec, Community Building for cooperation partners and scientific communities and the research group Visual Analytics, all of which expand the AV-Portal’s service
portfolio.
... ist Product Owner des TIB AV-Portals // ... is product owner of the TIB AV Portal
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