Acquisition Component

The acquisition is carried out on a potentially distributed system: this component (ACQ from now on) centralizes the acquisition of all media essences and decouples the system from the different media sources. The ACQ accepts essence files, zip archives contaning one or more artifact files (images, video or audio streams, html web pages) along with a profile stored in xml format. It collects spot-related files, already filtered from raw material: for example, regarding press it will acquire spot images (produced using the AdClipper tool), not review pages.

It is basically an event dispatcher: once a new material is ready, it fetches it, stores it into a data repository and the notifies analysis modules via web service.

The ACQ was designed in order to fulfull the following requirements:

• provide a consistent and homogeneous framework to deal with the different types of media;
• provide decoupling mechanism toward the different media types and acquisition modalities;
• must be easily customizable, in order to deal with different data sources and production environments;
• must be easily configurable;
• provide status monitoring, via a graphical user interface.