Profuz Digital - Profuz LAPIS asset management solution tailored for the Council of Europe
Categories Cloud - Storage
Council of Europe using Profuz LAPIS Solution made by developer Profuz Digital
End user - Council of Europe
Project summary
The Council of Europe has a huge and rapidly growing digital archive of all its proceedings. It worked with the developer Profuz Digital to create a new management, workflow and access platform called Profuz LAPIS. The new platform is cloud-native and almost infinitely scalable.
Project description
The Council of Europe was formally founded in 1949. Today it has 46 member states with a total population of approximately 675 million people. Beginning with the goal of unifying a continent ravaged by war, today it serves to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe. The Council has two statutory bodies: the Committee of Ministers, formed of the foreign ministers of each member state; and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which brings together members of each national parliament. From within these bodies, committees and working groups are formed. The Council is based in Strasbourg, France.Because its workings are of importance across the continent, its formal assemblies and other committees are recorded for television.
The Council's content is recorded in two official languages – French and English – and some proceedings are also in German and Italian, which means content has to be tagged with the original language and linked to simultaneous translations.The result is a large and rapidly growing archive of content, with rich metadata. Access is required by users within the Council staff, within the various national delegations and their supporting civil servants, and to the media and other interested parties.
Description of solution
Needing a modern, powerful and adaptable solution to the significant asset management and workflow challenges, the Council of Europe worked with Profuz Digital, a specialist systems integration developer based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The company specialises in custom software solutions for major partners, drawing on some core technologies including its Profuz LAPIS business process and information management system.Profuz Digital’s French technology partner, SAV - an audiovisual solutions specialist - introduced the Council of Europe to the Profuz LAPIS platform and played a key role in the collaboration. SAV was the initial link between the customer and the supplier by presenting the LAPIS solution to the Council of Europe and helped define the customer's requirements. They carried out the follow-up of the project and participated in the training sessions. Today, SAV continues to provide level 1 support for the LAPIS solution.
Profuz LAPIS provides a central, powerful dashboard from which to search, review, interact and process media and data which is held across a wide range of local, remote or cloud-based storage systems and databases.
LAPIS also allows unlimited connectivity with APIs and Amazon and can be deployed on AWS to be connected to Amazon storage systems. Adding such a single and system-agnostic interface for both existing and future storage infrastructures, ensures exhaustive management of media and data, while maintaining a consistent user interface, leading to improved accuracy and reduced user burden.As LAPIS is an open, cloud-native system, that can scale instantly and connect to any other open technology, it makes it a practical platform to integrate with existing storage platforms at the Council of Europe. In this specific installation, it is used as an advanced, dynamic content engine, providing archiving and database functionality within the Council’s business processes.Users can organise and find content instantly, using an intuitive filter structure tailored to the very specific requirements of this high-volume, high-pressure system. It includes a comprehensive permissions architecture, including workgroups, to ensure users see only assets relevant to them, and eliminating the risk of unapproved content being published.
The LAPIS system is used for every part of the workflow, from content ingest and storage to advanced media searches. It uses AI to further accelerate creative workflows and ensure that the user experience is always tuned to expectations, even at the very large scale involved. It streamlines workflows by automatically updating and reassessing assets, seamless integrating data into the content engine and avoiding manual processes.The installation is hosted in the cloud, which means qualified users can interact with the archive from any location. Intelligence ensures that content delivery is in the optimum resolution supported by the bandwidth available, as well as managing the multiple language tracks. Being built on the open LAPIS software, the new system is future-proof and capable of virtually unlimited expansion.Leading the development project were Alain Mielle, head of innovation at the Council of Europe, and Kamen Ferdinandov, CTO of Profuz Digital. “We were impressed with Kamen’s vision and expertise,” Mielle said. “He is ahead of the game – including AI – and he understands the market. We were won over by the Profuz team’s professional approach.
“This is not a run of the mill digital asset management system,” Mielle continued. “It offers so much more in terms of functionality and features, and we have seen significant productivity gains, along with positive user feedback.”The positive user response and productivity gains come in part from the self-service portals included in the software, which reduces the number of people required to run the operation while giving users the sense of being in charge of their interactions. The powerful search engine helps researchers find historical content quickly.
The Council of Europe continues to work with Profuz Digital on future enhancements to the system and will evaluate later this year, the introduction of Profuz Digital’s advanced subtitling platform SubtitleNEXT. The goal is to enhance the AI capabilities by automatically transcribing the recordings to provide full-text metadata, making searching even more powerful.
The team is also looking at using AI in other ways, again to provide even more power to researchers looking for material in this huge archive.On the topic of Artificial Intelligence, Alain noted, “I believe AI is not designed to replace humans but to work side by side and to enhance our work processes, but there is a real need for regulation. We are seeing the tip of the iceberg of the capabilities of AI, and it will have a huge impact on the way we work in the future.
All features within Profuz LAPIS have been customised to enable journalists and IT teams at the Council of Europe to collaborate immediately. The assets are cloud-native, and automatically scale to meet traffic and processing demands, ensuring both the application and experiences remain responsive to change. We look forward to enjoying a long-term partnership and thank our French partner SAV for their collaboration on the project.”“We are honoured to support the Council of Europe,” said Ivanka Vassileva, CEO of Profuz Digital.
“This development is a world-leading system, and we are proud that it plays a central role in the work of the Council and its public understanding. Its powerful, flexible features will continue to grow, as the requirements develop and drawing on advancing technologies, including AI.We look forward to working with the Council of Europe for many years to come.”
