The Use of XML in a Video Digital Library

Abstract

Video can be considered today as a primarily mean of communication, due to its richness in informative content and to its appeal. Indeed, the combination of audio and video is an extremely important communication channel: it is considered that approximately 50% of what is seen and heard simultaneously is retained. Due to all these considerations, audio/video is particularly important in many different application sectors, such as TV broadcasting, professional applications (e.g. medicine, journalism, advertising, education, etc.), movie production, historical video archives. Furthermore, most of the video material produced is extremely difficult to access, due to several limitations: video documents are extremely large in size, so that archiving and transmission are expensive; video document’s content, even if extremely rich, is difficult to extract in order to support an effective content-based retrieval.