Hypermedia Information Systems

In the last four chapters we have described applications of HCVM in e-sales recruitment, e-banking, e-business data organization and knowledge management. In chapter 5 we also described the multimedia component of the HCVM. In all these chapters multimedia has been looked at in terms of how it can be used for improving the representational efficiency, effectiveness and interpretation of computer-based artifacts and also to some extent how it can be used for perceptual problem solving. In fact, multimedia data (e.g., text, image, video and audio) today is an inherent part of Internet and web-based applications. In that respect, there are interesting research issues and problems associated with management and retrieval of multimedia data from multimedia databases. Queries and operations based on classical approaches (e.g., relational database structures) just won’t do for multimedia data, where browsing is an important paradigm. The importance of this paradigm is illustrated by the fact that multimedia databases are sometimes referred to as hypermedia databases. Standard indexing approaches won’t work for annotation independent, content-based queries over multimedia data. The problem is further compounded by the fact that metadata of different media artifacts cannot be effectively used for modeling user queries involving text, image, video and audio data. Incorporating user semantics is an effective way of dealing with multimedia data indexing and retrieval.