Semantics: The Active Index

Abstract

In multimedia computing, an important issue is how to index multimedia objects, so that the multimedia objects can be accessed quickly and certain actions can be performed automatically. In conventional database systems, keyword-based indexing techniques are adequate to support users’ needs. In multimedia information systems, there are many applications that cannot be properly supported by keyword-based techniques. In addition to keywords, users often want to access/manipulate multimedia objects by shape, texture, spatial relationships, etc. That is, certain features of the multimedia objects are used as indexes, and, in many cases, they cannot be represented as keywords. The representation of these feature-based indexes poses some special problems:

• (1) Indexes are approximately represented.

• (2) Indexes do not have an implicit ordering, in the sense that if a, b and c are three index values and a > b > c, it does not mean that multimedia object b is more similar to visual object a than multimedia object c.

• (3) Indexes may have interrelated multiple attributes.