Abstract
The Data Research Center for Marine-Earth Sciences of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) manages many deep-sea videos and photos obtained from manned/unmanned research submersibles owned by JAMSTEC. The database system “JAMSTEC E-library of Deep-sea Images (J-EDI)”, which is being operated at the Global Oceanographic Data Center (GODAC) since its development in 2011, has made these videos and photos available to the public via the Internet. There is no other web system distributing various deep-sea environmental images in large numbers. Original video data recorded in JAMSTEC's submersibles are transcoded into a format for web streaming, and photo data are resized. Furthermore, they are annotated with subject details (e.g. living organisms, geography, environments and others) by GODAC staffs. The number of videos and photos with annotations has increased drastically using J-EDI. On the other hand, although it is necessary to distribute deep-sea image data in a suitable format for use, there is a problem that the process of making videos for web streaming has been complicated by the diverse formats of the original video data. In addition, annotations are effective to search for the target data from a large amount of data, but a broad scientific knowledge on deep-sea environments is required for detailed identification of objects in images. Many of current annotation contents on J-EDI provide only rough taxonomic information of living objects. To improve the situation, collaboration with specialists in the annotation process will be necessary.
