Research

Funded by the Hungarian Ministry of Education, this R&D project aimed at developing the prototype of an online communication infrastructure supporting the spontaneous organisation of scholarly communities. The project involved the selection and integration of the elements of this infrastructure and the functional specificaction and interface design of this online networking platform.

In 2002-3, in the framework of the Apertus Didakta program and in cooperation with the Coedu Ltd. and the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences we have developed an e-learning management system, in view of the requirements of higher education. During the implementation of the project the consortium prepared 24 different e-learning semesters to be launched in Hungarian higher education, and it compiled a special know how in higher education e-learning.

The COMMUNIA Thematic Network has been working for over three years at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of existing and emerging issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment - as well as related topics, including, but not limited to, alternative forms of licensing for creative material; open access to scientific publications and research results; management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

In 2007 we organized a workshop series on the National Audiovisual Media Strategy.

The Budapest University of Technology and Economics is the Hungarian affiliate of the international Creative Commons Movement. We have been working on the localization of licenses, on community building, advocacy since 2005. See creativecommons.org or creativecommons.hu for more.

There is a vast amount of data that is generated through the daily practice of customer care in large corporations. This information shall be recorded and preserved in order to serve as an important resource that can be mobilised in the subsequent interactions of customer care staff. The immediate objective of this project is to develop an intelligent automated support system that could be put to use in customer care work within telecommunications companies. The development of such a system would also contribute towards the establishment of a more universal ontology-infrastructure that could be put to used in other fields of activity after appending the given infrastructure with the specific vocabulary of the field in question.

Mindentudás Egyeteme (ME) is a popular education program developed in co-operation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Magyar Telekom. ME is broadcast on a number of TV channels and enhanced by additional information published in various print media and online). After 2 and a half year of successful operation, increasing uses numbers and a steadily growing information pool called for a redesign of the original online infrastructure including the selection and application of a new content management system as well as the development of a more dynamic site that enables users to more freely select individual pathways through the content offered on the ME portal.

MOKK played a major part in the technical and functional specification of this complext digital archive that collects primarily obligatory copies of Hungarian radio and TV broadcasts. The archived digital content is searchable and accessible through a network of NAVA access-points mostly situated in public libraries. MOKK also played an important role in the further development of the archive and the conception and planning of new services such as Gramofon Online, a grass-roots archive of Hungarian gramophone recordings curated and developed from the bottom up by a community private collectors.

MOKK was commissioned to develop the design concept of the National Didital Archive, (NDA) and provide a feasibility study. Instead of a classic archive, we conceptualised an integrated network of independent institutions. In this network, a set of international synthactical and semantic standards and common knowledge management tools are put to use in order to ensure seamless communication and inter-operability.

Using transactional data (real time observation of p2p downloading activity by users of three major Hungarian torrent trackers) and movie distribution statistics in the first part of our article we found that shortage-driven downloaders (pirating old catalogues only) outnumber those downloading only current theatrical releases, while the majority pirates both categories.

The P2P-FUSION is a project funded by the European Commission's ICT FP-6 aimed at developing a new software system that supports audiovisual creative activities and makes it easy for anyone to create, reuse and share audio and video productions over the internet legally, without costly servers and complicated system management. Fusion binds together a peer-to-peer network, a distributed semantic database, social enrichment features, audiovisual production and editing software, support for embedded licenses and a social media application toolkit into an integrated easy-to-use solution.

The analysis of current and potential uses of new networked communication enhanced by mobile multimedia. Focusing on practical applications as well as ideologies and cultural backgrounds of particular user communities, the project was to produce 'state of the art' reports on actual trends based on secondary sources, as well as research mapping emerging uses of mobile multimedia and locative media technologies. The research project involved various strands ranging from thematic and functional mapping mediated information use and communication, as well as the identification and analysis of temporal and spatial patterns in the use of 3G/4G technologies.