topical media & game development
research directions -- digital libraries
Where
media abstractions, as discussed above,
aremeant to be technical abstractions needed for
uniform access to media items,
we need quite a different set of abstraction
to cope with one of the major applications
of multimedia information storage and retrieval:
digital libraries.
According to [IR], digital libraries will need
a long time to evolve, not only because there
are many technical hurdles to be overcome,
but also because effective digital libraries
are dependent on an active community of users:
digital libraries
Digital libraries are constructed -- collected and organized --
by a community of users.
Their functional capabilities support the information needs
and users of this community.
Digital libraries are an extension, enhancement and integration of
a variety of information institutions as physicalplaces
where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved
and accessed in support of a user community.
The occurrence of digital libraries on the web is partly a response
to advances in technology, and partly due to an increased
appreciation of the facilities the internet can provide.
From a development perspective, digital libraries
may be regarded as:
... federated structures that provide humans both
intellectual and physical access to the huge and growing
worldwide networks of information encoded in multimedia
digital formats.
Early research in digital libraries has focussed
on the digitization of existing material,
for the preservation of our cultural heritage, as well as
on architectural issues for the 'electronic preservation', so to
speak, of digital libraries themselves, to make them "immune
to degradation and technological obsolescence", [IR].
To bring order in the variety of research issues
related to digital libraries, [IR] introduces
a set of abstractions that is know as the 5S model:
digital libraries (5S)
- streams: (content) -- from text to multimedia content
- structures: (data) -- from database to hypertext networks
- spaces: (information) -- from vector space to virtual reality
- scenarios: (procedures) -- from service to stories
- societies: (stakeholders) -- from authors to libraries
These abstractions act as "a framework for providing
theoretical and practical unification of digital libraries".
More concretely, observe that the framework encompasses
three technical notions (streams, structures and spaces;
which correspond more or less with data, content and information)
and two notions related to the social context
of digital libraries (scenarios and societies;
which range over possible uses and users, respectively).
For further research you may look at the
following resources:
D-Lib Forum -- www.dlib.org
Informedia -- www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu
The D-Lib Forum site gives access to a variety
of resources, including a magazine with background articles
as well as a test-suite that may help you in developing
digital library technology.
The Informedia site provides an example of a digital library project,
with research on, among others, video content analysis,
summarization and in-context result presentation.
(C) Æliens
04/09/2009
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