Continuous hierarchical exploration of multimedia collections

Preserving continuity between individual exploration steps in a process of multimedia exploration is a concept of natural intuition that sometimes decides if a particular exploration system is usable or not. One of ways how to emulate the continuity of the exploration process is adding some sort of granularity into this process. Then anyone who uses such system can explore particular areas in less or more details. In this paper we proposed new concept, hierarchical querying, which keeps consecutive steps of the exploration process more tight to each other. As a second concept, which directly supports the continuity of the exploration process, we proposed preservation of a user context between consecutive steps of the exploration process. In addition, we also presented an evaluation process and architecture design of our multimedia exploration system. For a validity confirmation of our ideas, we have implemented all proposed concepts in a web application that is accessible online.