1. THE PHAROS PLATFORM AND DEMO PHAROS [1] is an Integrated Project aimed at building a platform for advanced audiovisual search applications. The Consortium comprises 12 partners from 9 European countries. PHAROS unbundles the functionalities of an audiovisual search engine into an open service-based ecosystem, where content can be submitted to customized analysis pipelines, third-party annotation components can be plugged-in, and content based search engines can be registered. PHAROS enables a variety of application scenarios, from content acquisition and enrichment, to annotation fusion, to multi-modal queries. Figure 1 shows the architecture of PHAROS, which supports two main process: Content Caption and Refinement (CCR) executes flow of operators on the captured content and produces XML metadata (subsequently indexed by a core XML search engine) and derived artifacts(used for similarity querying and result presentation); Query Execution and Result Presentation (QUIRP) accepts a user’s query (by keyword, by image similarity, by audio similarity, by video similarity), expands it with user’s profile and social information, brokers its execution on the registered search engines, and presents results in a Rich Internet Interface. The demo exploits the online access to the PHAROS platform for an in-depth tour of: content acquisition, design and