Introduction to Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 9

The ASW Studio ¹

9.1. Introduction

The ASW Studio is made up of a set of software and resources, called Escom Suite, and a Web application constituting the Publishing Workshop, called Semiosphere.

The ESCoM Suite applications are developed in C# (.Net Framework 4). They all use the SemioscapeEntities,¹ SemioscapeDataAccess,² SemioscapeControllers³ and SemioscapeConverters⁴ libraries presented in Chapter 8. The requests on the database are always made through Web services,⁵ which ensures the use of these tools remotely and with no particular network constraints, other than that we must have an Internet connection. They also use common libraries of resources and user controls: Semioscape Resources and SemioscapeUserControls. Hence, these applications are essentially composed of controls and forms enabling them to represent the data, the main mechanisms having already been defined in the aforementioned libraries.

The ESCoM suite encompasses five applications and resources forming part of the ASW Workshop:

1. SemioscapeData, a set of metalinguistic resources of the system, as well as those of the ASW domain ontology, in the form of XML files;

2. ffCoder, a tool for encoding videos for distribution on the portals;

3. OntoEditor, a tool for editing Ontology-type objects (metalexicons of conceptual terms, models of description composed of sequences and schemas as well as thesauruses);

4. Interview, tools for editing MetaDescription-type objects (semiotic descriptions);