Objective

• To investigate and develop system architectures and tools for intelligent storage, querying and retrieval of digital media content;
• To design and develop content models and associated tools for digital video and audio media incorporating structural and semantic representations of the content;
• To investigate and develop advanced methods for finding and retrieving relevant documents from within large collections of electronic text.

Introduction

Industries such as news, media and on-line information services are undergoing major restructuring as a direct consequence of the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web. Much of this activity is focused on the management of information assets and their accessibility in on-line scenarios such as through the Internet, corporate networks, and other forms of interactive networked service delivery. This focus on information access and delivery is also manifest in the creation and development of business models linked to value-added information services and products.

The project has been investigating, developing and demonstrating innovative technologies that are particularly relevant to digital media libraries and on-line information services. These technologies address issues such as:

• Significant data volume requirements taking into account the variety and number of information objects and their potential storage size;
• Sophisticated indexing and cataloguing facilities (often computationally intensive) in order to represent the complex relationships present in digital media collections and facilitate advanced forms of information reuse;
• Effective networked access to diverse digital media collections for a range of users and supporting a broad class of information retrieval and delivery mechanisms.