Quaero

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Quaero (Latin: I seek) is the name of a research and development program which has the goal of developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications (such as search engines)^[1].

This program is supported by the French Agency for Industrial Innovation (AII). It is a French project with the participation of several German partners. The consortium is led by Thomson. Other companies involved in the consortium are: France Télécom, Exalead, Bertin Technologies, Jouve, Grass Valley GmbH, Vecsys, LTU Technologies, and Synapse Développement. Many public research institutes are also involved, including LIMSI-CNRS, INRIA, RWTH Aachen, University of Karlsruhe, IRIT, Clips Imag, GET, INRA; as well as other public organisations such as INA, BNF, LIPN and DGA.

According to the AII press release the main targeted applications can be divided in three broad classes: multimedia indexing and search tools for professional and general public use, including mobile environments; professional solutions for production, post-production, management and distribution of multimedia documents; and facilitation of access to cultural heritage such as audiovisual archives and digital libraries.

1 Announcement
2 The search Engine
3 Criticism
4 German Departure
5 See also
6 References
7 Source
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Announcement

Quaero was announced by Jacques Chirac during the French-German ministerial conference of Reims in April 2005, and was scheduled to be officially launched in early 2006 by the Agence de l'innovation industrielle (AII). Close to €90m from the governments of France and Germany are supposed to go towards development of Quaero.[1]

[edit] The search Engine

The search engine application has been the focus of the attention of many news articles. As a consequence, Quaero is often cited as a European competitor to Google, as well as other commercial search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves.

Quaero is not intended to be a text-based search engine but is mainly meant for multimedia search. The search engine will use techniques for recognizing, transcribing, indexing, and automatic translation of audiovisual documents and it will operate in several languages. There is also mention of automatic recognition and indexing of images.

According to an article in The Economist^[2], Quaero will allow users to search using a "query image", not just a group of keywords. In a process known as "image mining", software that recognises shapes and colours will be used to look for and retrieve still images and video clips that contain images similar to the query image. (The software is supplied by LTU Technologies.) A technique called "keyword propagation" will be used so that when Quaero finds a descriptionless image which contains elements of or completely matches a properly labelled image, it will append the description from the labelled image to the unlabelled one. This will ensure faster searches and a definite enrichment of the web, also linguistically, as the primary interface and query terms were supposed to be in French and German.

As France will be researching image-searching, Germany was supposed to be advancing voice clip and sound media searches, with the intention of transcribing their content to text, and translating it to other languages, before they pulled out of the project. This would also allow for "query sound clips" following the paradigm of the "query image" mentioned above.

[edit] Criticism

Jacques Chirac

The French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné pointed out that the funding behind the project is dwarfed by both Microsoft or Google. Search experts Autonomy, (Financial Times) called the plan "a blatant case of misguided and unnecessary nationalism". The main issues being that: by the time of Quaero's launch, the search engine market will be a generation ahead of Quaero in media and device capabilities; some argue that Mr Chirac is more interested in defending French pride than global advancement of the Internet.[2]

According to the print edition of The Economist, January 6th 2007 (pp. 5), Quaero "was reportedly Scrapped" since the german part "grumbled about the cost and have indicated they will produce their own, scaled-down search engine".

[edit] German Departure

On Dec 18, 2006, Hartmut Schauerte, a state secretary within the Ministry for Economics and Labour, announced during the IT-Gipfel summit in Potsdam that a German consortium has put together a semantic search project called Theseus that will be distinct from Quaero^[3].

The main source of disagreement was the format of the search engine, with German engineers favoring a text-based search engine and the French engineers favoring a multimedia search engine. Many German engineers also balked at what they thought was becoming too much of an anti-Google project, rather than a project driven by its own ideals^[4].