Improving Access to Multimedia Using Multi-source Hierarchical Meta-data

Efficient retrieval of multi-media content depends on the availability of adequate meta-data to indicate the nature of the content. Such meta-data often contains useful hierarchical categorisation but is frequently not consistent between different sources. We outline a method to identify equivalent instances which are described by different meta-data schemata, and to find correspondences between hierarchies, which may be used to improve instance matching. Some successful initial tests of the method on large movie databases are reported.