The SAPHIR project (French acronym signifying “Support System for Hypermedia Publication Aimed at Explaining the Intentions and Application of Rhetorical Principles”) is a French R&D project financed through the framework of national programs like RIAM, ANR and OSEO-ANVAR (project duration: February 2006 – February 2009).
The SAPHIR project deals with a semantically rich issue: indexing content from online audiovisual collections with the goal of republishing them in specific publication formats: interactive video-books, hypermedia folders, educational folders, video-glossaries, virtual narrative journeys, and so forth.
The SAPHIR project is coordinated by the INA-Recherche. In addition to the ESCoM at the FMSH, other project partners include the LIRMM from the Université de Montpellier, the LERIA from the Université d’Angers, and the NETIA company.
ESCoM has a dual role in the Saphir project: bring semiotic and rhetorical expertise to the analysis of audiovisual documents and develop a pilot project in the form of a thematically limited portal site that uses online audiovisual collections in the field of linguistic and cultural diversity. This portal site is called LCD – Linguistic and Cultural Diversity - and is composed of: an online library containing some 500 hours of online video indexed via field-based ontology; an evolving hypermedia encyclopedia enabling systematic appropriation of a given field of knowledge with the help of “main subjects” or thematic indexes; a library of educational folders; and, a small library containing bilingual versions of certain videos.






