The Design of A Web-based Multimedia Information Retrieval System

In a large-scale and distributed visual information retrieval system, various multimedia databases are distributed throughout the Internet. Accessing multimedia databases distributed across remote sites has been made possible by the advent of the World Wide Web using the Internet as the medium. However, accessing such multimedia databases over the Web poses several challenges relating to the selection of those multimedia databases at distributed locations that are most relevant to a user query. In this paper, we investigate approaches to the creation of an integrated visual information retrieval system which supports global visual query access to various multimedia databases over the Web. A meta-server including a meta-database and a meta-search agent is designed to support such an integration. The meta-database organizes the meta-data of data housed at each remote multimedia database and query capabilities. The meta-search agent controls the distribution of user queries to relevant database sites through the site server. Two database selection approaches are presented and compared. The system is implemented using Java in a Web-based environment.