Multimedia management and query processing issues in distributed digital libraries: a HERMES perspective

Multimedia applications accessing large amounts of data require efficient browsing and searching mechanisms to extract relevant information. The system has to preselect items of interest from the database. Additionally, it has to support continuous presentation of time-dependent media. Browsing system components for multimedia data management are proposed that are developed within the HERMES project. They offer conceptual, content based access to videos. Our retrieval engine calculates relevance values for the results of a conceptual query by feature aggregation on video shot granularity. An intelligent client buffer strategy uses the relevance values from retrieval as presentation support. It prefers to keep those shots in the cache which have a high relevance value.