Multimedia Archives and Mediators

During the last decade, the cost of storage and wide area communication services has decreased, while their capacity increased dramatically. This fact, along with the increasing penetration of e-commerce applications, has made digital storage, annotation and access of multimedia information a mature and viable choice for content holding organizations and individuals. Numerous multimedia archives have, either totally or incrementally, turned to the utilization of digitized archive technologies. The content of these archives can be made accessible, depending upon copyright, policy and security decisions, over the Internet in a cost efficient, time efficient, anyplace, anytime fashion. However, one of the main problems of multimedia archiving has been inherited to their digital descendants. For traditional archives, where raw media were stored in the form of analog hard copies, search was not an easy task as a human had to either go through a separate annotation archive, or, ideally, search using keywords in a custom, proprietary, metadata database. Much similarly to the case of books in a library that have not been indexed, information stored in a multimedia archive that cannot be searched, identified and accessed easily is practically unavailable.