The goal of project Cadmos is to innovate the production pipeline of narrative multimedia through the use of semantic annotation.

Currently, there exists a semantic gap between the author’s original idea and the media objects that result from production. The idea brought about by project CADMOS is to provide a semantic annotation to all production documents (screenplay, script breakdown, stage design, pre-visualization, editing, etc.), so the narrative features are propagated until the final product and remains available for retrieval and reuse tasks.

The benefit of semantic narrative annotation is twofold:

• Along the production pipeline, it is possible to verify the achievement of the authors intent and to optimize the production time and costs, with better products thanks to the sharing of the information about the narrative content among all the professional roles.
• The annotated narrative media (either annotated during the production phase or afterwards) can be navigated and searched for narrative features, facilitating the reuse in new productions, the analysis by experts and the access by the general public. 

The central notion of project CADMOS is the dramatic media object, the basic unit of a storytelling artefact. The annotation schema assumes the centrality of characters for the description of the narrative content. Characters provide the primary identification means for the audience and their actions constitute a natural key for describing the plot of a story. Characters are formally described in terms of long-term goals and related behaviours. The annotation language will rely upon an ontology-based terminological base and the annotation process will be carried out through a web-based software platform.

The analysis perspective will be addressed through the development of a semi-automatic annotation process that will suggest the annotator an effective labelling based on the narrative structure; the annotated corpus will be explored through an interface for the search of segments and proposal of re-use. The production perspective will take advantage from the design and implementation of a novel workflow, derived by the current practices in new media, for carrying out annotation-enriched productions from scratch (producers of premium content), and the design and implementation of an interface for search and retrieval of annotated archive material for carrying out productions based on repertoires (content aggregators).