Navigation and visualization of movies content

The description and manipulation of the information embedded in video data is the key challenge for future multimedia technologies. The multilevel messages conveyed by time-varying visual data can be suitably handled only when a structured conceptual schema is built, which takes into account the multiple links among different elements of visual speech. In the paper a new schema for film data is introduced and a hypermedia navigation system is proposed, which is based upon this conceptual model. Such a system integrates the technical and visual content of a film into a comprehensive framework and makes it possible to navigate and display the different classes of content in a unconstrained sequence. The navigation task does not require any knowledge of complex query languages, since a query is structured as a form of data filtering through the formal operator of "perspective".