Table Of ContentDATABASE SEMANTICS
Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems
IFIP -The International Federation for Information Processing
IFIP was founded in 1960 under the auspices of UNESCO, following the First World
Computer Congress held in Paris the previous year. An umbrella organization for societies
working in information processing, IFIP's aim is two-fold: to support information
processing within its member countries and to encourage technology transfer to developing
nations. As its mission statement clearly states,
IFIP's mission is to be the leading, truly international, apolitical organization which
encourages and assists in the development, exploitation and application of information
technology for the benefit of all people.
IFIP is a non-profitmaking organization, run almost solely by 2500 volunteers. It operates
through a number oftechnical committees, which organize events and publications. IFIP's
events range from an international congress to local seminars, but the most important are:
· The IFIP World Computer Congress, held every second year;
· open conferences;
· working conferences.
The flagship event is the IFIP World Computer Congress, at which both invited and
contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the
rejection rate is high.
As with the Congress, participation in the open conferences is open to all and papers may
be invited or submitted. Again, submitted papers are stringently refereed.
The working conferences are structured differently. They are usually run by a working
group and attendance is small and by invitation only. Their purpose is to create an
atmosphere conducive to innovation and development. Refereeing is less rigorous and
papers are subjected to extensive group discussion.
Publications arising from IFIP events vary. The papers presented at the IFIP World
Computer Congress and at open conferences are published as conference proceedings, while
the results of the working conferences are often published as collections of selected and
edited papers.
Any national society whose primary activity is in information may apply to become a full
member of IFIP, although full membership is restricted to one society per country. Full
members are entitled to vote at the annual General Assembly, National societies preferring
a less committed involvement may apply for associate or corresponding membership.
Associate members enjoy the same benefits as full members, but without voting rights.
Corresponding members are not represented in IFIP bodies. Affiliated membership is open
to non-national societies, and individual and honorary membership schemes are also offered.
DATABASE SEMANTICS
Semantic Issues in Multimedia Systems
IFIP TC21WG2.6 Eighth Working Conference on
Database Semantics (DS-8)
Rotorua, New Zealand, January 4-8,1999
edited by
Robert Meersman
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Zahir Tari
Royal Melbourne Institute o/Technology
Scott Stevens
Carnegie Mellon University
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4757-4916-8 ISBN 978-0-387-35561-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-35561-0
Copyright © 1999 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Origina1ly published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Printed an acid-free paper.
Contents
Preface vii
1
Semantic Interactivity in Presence Systems 1
R. Jain
2
Towards the construction of the Multimedia Mediation Mechanism 3
M. Sakauchi
3
Can WWW be successful? 17
H. Maurer
4
Resource Prediction and Admission Control for Video Browsing 27
K. Aberer and S. Holl/elder
5
Data Semantics for Improving Retrieval Performance 47
G. Ahanger and T.D.C. Little
6
Syntactical and Semantical Description of Video Sequences 65
N. Luth, A. Miene, and P. Alshuth
7
A Multi-Model Framework for Video Information Systems 85
U. Srinivasan, C. Lindley, and B.S. Young
8
COS IS: a Content-Oriented Shoeprint Identification System 109
M. T. M eharga, C. Plazanet, and S. Spaccapietra
v
vi SEMANTIC ISSUES IN MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS
9
User Interface for Emergent Semantics 123
S. Santini, A. Gupta and R. Jain
10
Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of TOOMM 145
V. Goebel, 1. Eini, K. Lund, and T. Plagemann
11
Spatiotemporal Specification & Verification for Multimedia Scenarios 169
1. Kostalas, T. Sellis, and M. Vaziryiannis
12
Zyx 189
- A Semantic Model for Multimedia Documents and Presentations
S. Boll and W. Klas
13
Fuzzy Logic Techniques in Multimedia Databases 211
D. Dubois, H. Prade, and F. Sedes
14
Defining Views in an Image Database System 231
V. Oria, M.T. Ozsu, D. SzaJron and P.J. Iglinski
15
3D Iconic Image Representation Scheme 251
J. W. Chang
16
Multimedia Information Retrieval Framework: From Theory to Practice 271
F. EI-Hadidy, H.J.G. de Poot, and D.D. Velthausz
17
Classification Based Navigation and Retrieval 291
S. Bechhofer and C. Goble
18
Searching Distributed and Heterogeneous Digital Media 311
A. Sheth and K. K. Shah
19
Using WG-Log schemata to represent semistructured data 331
E. Damiani, B. Oliboni, L. Tanca, D. Veronese
20
Ontobroker 351
S. Decker, M. Erdmann, D. Fensel and R. Studer
21
Adaptive and Adaptable Semantics 371
D.C.A. Bulterman, L. Rutledge, L. Hardman and J. van Ossenbruggen
Contents vii
22
Quality of Service Semantics for Multimedia Database Systems 393
J. Walpole, L. Liu., D. Maier, C. Pu., and C. Krasic
23
Semantics of a Multimedia Database for Support Within Synthetic 413
Environments for Multiple Sensor Systems
G. Sterling, T. Dillon, and E. Chang
24
Two Data Organizations for Storing Symbolic Images in a Relational 435
Database System
A. Soffer and H. Samet
Preface
Multimedia Technology has been capturing popular imagination in recent times.
For the general public, multimedia is often synonymous with the World Wide
Web. At the time of this conference, microprocessors continue to follow Moore's
law, doubling every 18 months and the capacity of fiber-optics is doubling ev
ery 12 months. But Internet traffic is doubling every 4 months. What is the
effect of today's use of the Web on Internet traffic? A telling statistic relates to
how much time, measured in clicks per site visited, people spend on Web sites.
Studies show the mean number of clicks per site ranges between 8 and 10, the
median is between 3 and 4, while the mode is I!
Amongst other things, these statistics show that today's search engines pro
vide many irrelevant items in their result sets. Users don't know a site is
unrelated to their search until after they visit it. User satisfaction is reason
enough to provide mechanisms to solve this problem. But as Internet use grows
exponentially faster than Internet resources, solutions become imperative.
It is clear that such solutions will involve more than just technologies such
as faster processors and higher bandwidth communications. The quality of the
underlying databases and support process become key components. Modern
advanced multimedia systems require a paradigm shift to allow the represen
tation and manipulation of complex text, image, audio, and video information.
An essential characteristic of this shift is clearly defined semantics for multi
media databases.
This the Eighth Data Semantics Working Conference (DS-8) focused on
those issues that involve the semantics of the information represented, stored,
and manipulated by multimedia systems. Topics and issues covered included:
data modeling and query languages for media such as audio, video, and images;
methodological aspects of multimedia database design, information retrieval,
knowledge discovery, and data mining; and multimedia user interfaces.
This proceedings contains three keynote speeches and 20 papers. One of
the expressed purposes of the conference was to provide an active forum for
researchers and practitioners to present and exchange research results. This
ix
x SEMANTIC ISSUES IN MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS
collection of papers offers the reader a glimpse of the excitement and enthusiasm
of DS-8.
The organization of both the conference and this book is composed of seven
sections: the keynote speeches and six thematic areas. The six broad areas are:
Video Data Modeling and Use; Image Databases; Applications of Multimedia
Systems; Multimedia Modeling in General; Multimedia Information Retrieval;
and Semantics and Metadata.
The three keynote speeches were by Ramesh Jain from the University of
San Diego, U.s.A. and PRAJA, Inc.; Hermann Maurer from the University of
Technology, Graz, Austria; and Masao Sakauchi from the University of Tokyo,
Japan. Professor Jain talked about Presence Technology (PT). Presence sys
tems blend component technologies like computer vision, signal understanding,
and multimedia information systems into a system that enables users to per
ceive, move around, and interact with remote live environments.
Professor Maurer asked questions like, "Can WWW be Successful when 10%
of all links will be broken by the end of 1998?" and "Can the WWW evolve
into a usable environment or must we start allover again?"
Professor Sakauchi, proposed a new framework for developing applications
and services. The "Multimedia Mediation Mechanism" provides services for
diverse multimedia environments such as streaming video and real-time envi
ronmental monitoring.
One of the most active research area today concerns computer mediated
digital video. The section on Video Data Modeling and Use contains papers
ranging from issues in quality of service to syntactical and semantical descrip
tions of video for archiving and intelligent retrieval of video.
Digital pictures are increasingly important. Large image databases such as
those from earth observing satellites are obvious applications. But even in
the home, the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and photo-realistic ink jet
printers will cause personal photography to become digital. The section on
Image Databases contains papers on content-based image retrieval and view
mechanisms.
All of the underlying multimedia techniques are of little value without appli
cations. The section on Applications of Multimedia Systems contains papers on
systems highlighting user interface semantics and query mechanisms for image
databases.
Regardless of the application, multimedia modeling is crucial. The sections
on Multimedia Modeling in General and Semantics and Metadata contain dis
cussions on semantic models and metadata for objects ranging from static ob
jects such as documents to temporal objects such as video and audio.
Searching and finding information becomes more difficult when the database
contains multimedia objects. The section on Multimedia Information Retrieval
presents key ideas in the search and retrieval of distributed heterogeneous
databases.
As is often the case, we had many more excellent submissions than the
conference or its proceedings could accommodate. The papers contained here
PREFACE xi
are an outstanding sample of the exciting work that is progressing worldwide
in the area of semantic issues in multimedia systems.
We would like to thank all of the people that made this working conference
such a success, especially the authors and our program committee. Without
their essential input this conference would, of course, not have been possible.
ROBERT MEERSMAN, SCOTI STEVENS, ZAHffi TARI
