Æliens

issues

• multimedia storage and retrieval -- homegrown, third-party and legacy sources
• information architecture -- common format, native format, hybrid
• media abstraction -- unified indexes, query relaxation

content organisation

• autonomy -- index per media type
• uniformity -- unified index
• hybrid -- media indexes + unified index

Principle of Uniformity

... from a semantical point of view the content of a multimedia source is independent of the source itself, so we may use statements as meta data to provide a description of media objects.

• from a semantical point of view the content of a multimedia source is independent of the source itself.
• use statements as meta data
• $md(o)$ -- metadata associated with media object o

tradeoffs

• metadata can be stored using standard relational and OO structures
• manipulating metadata is easy
• feature extraction is (!) straightforward

  is it?

software architecture

• a database of media object, supporting
• operations on media objects, and offering
• logical views on media objects

information retrieval cycle

1. specification of the user's information need
2. translation into query operations
3. search and retrieval of media objects
4. ranking according to likelihood or relevance
5. presentation of results and user feedback
6. resulting in a possibly modified query

• despite high interactivity, access is difficult;
• quick response is and will remain important!