SNML-TNG: Salzburg NewMediaLab – The Next Generation

Salzburg NewMediaLab – The Next Generation (SNML-TNG) is the competence centre in Austria that takes the knowledge and media industry into the Future Internet, helping its partners to address the new challenges arising with the paradigmatic shift that is currently affecting the industry. SNML-TNG conducts research on the socio-economic and the technological level in the fields of Social Computing, Social Media & Enterprise 2.0, Semantic Web & Linked Data, and Multimedia Annotations. A common trait of all fields is what we call “Linked Media”, which is therefore at the heart of our research programme. Linked Media in our definition is the convergence of linked people, linked content, and linked data.

• on the socio-economic level, SNML-TNG will explore the use of Linked Media in the Enterprise 2.0, the issue of Trust and Reputation, as well as Future Social Media Interfaces. Socio-economic research will be carried out in the form of studies and visionary scenario proposals that are specifically tailored towards our company partners.
• on the technological-conceptual level, SNML-TNG will investigate open technological research questions in the areas of Social Media, Linked Data, Recommendation Systems, and Multimedia Annotations and develop appropriate models and methodologies.
• on the technological development level, SNML-TNG will implement an Open Source framework (the “Linked Media Framework”) verifying the feasibility of its ideas in a practical system that can be further developed into a functioning platform by the partners.

We will validate our ideas in five scenarios implemented on top of the Linked Media Framework driven by the requirements of our company partners. Three of these scenarios are so-called “exploitation scenarios” investigating concrete problems at the partners and contributing to the intended process and product innovations. In addition, we will develop two so-called “capability scenarios” described in the first year based on results of our research and implemented as prototypes in the third year to demonstrate to our partners and the general public the potential of applying Linked Media technologies.
SNML-TNG brings together leading Austrian research institutes with a proven excellence in the areas of Social Media, Semantic Technologies and Multimedia (Salzburg Research, STI Innsbruck, FH Salzburg) and major members of the Austrian knowledge and media industry (ORF, Red Bull Media House), as well as a number of innovative technology companies (punkt. netServices, mediamid, Technodat). In addition to these companies, we have been able to acquire support from additional large companies (Salzburg AG, Salzburger Nachrichten, factline Webservices) that have declared substantial interest in the topics investigated at SNML-TNG.

The research centre is funded by the Austrian Federal Minister of Economy, Family and Youth (BMWFJ), the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) and the Province of Salzburg, is co-ordinated by Salzburg Research and gives access to a wide network of Austrian technology leaders in media and knowledge management.