The webspace method: on the integration of database technology with multimedia retrieval

Large collections of documents containing various types of multimedia, are made available to theWWW. Unfortunately, due to the un-structuredness of Internet environments it is hard to find specific information when one is looking for it. Search engines available can only rely their results on information retrieval techniques and most of the time they lack the desired power in query formulation. Modelling data on the web, as if it was designed for use within databases, should provide us with the necessary basis for enhancing this query formulation. This of course requires special care for dealing with the included multimedia data and the semi-structured aspects of data on the web.Modelling the entire web would be too ambitious, therefore we focus on a more feasible environment, like the intranet, where one can find large collections of related data. With the webspace method we have already shown how to deal with the various aspects of semi-structured data in large collections of related documents. In this paper we focus on the integration of our webspace method for concept-based search with content -based multimedia information retrieval (IR). A webspace consists of two levels. At the document level, a webspace is considered to be a collection of related documents. At the semantical level, concepts are defined to be used in the documents at the document level. By modelling these concepts using a webspace schema a semantical level of abstraction is gained. This supplies the necessary platform for querying data available within a specific webspace. For the integration with content-based information retrieval an existing IR model is adopted. We will discuss how this is used in the context of Mirror, a Multimedia DBMS, and how this framework is used for the integration with the webspace method for concept-based search.