Object-Oriented Multimedia Annotation for Large-Scale Mapping System

Recently, advanced functions for multimedia mapping systems are developed as a part of large scale customer information service in public companies such as electric power, water, gas supply, etc. In these customer service systems, note information is required to be managed in a paper-less manner. The non-standard, temporary annotational information which was conventionally recorded as a note on a paper is necessary to be arranged in time order then classified by customers and to be made available as the customer database. Moreover, an advanced function that can easily retrieve the contents of these databases by specifying the customers’ house frame on the displayed map is required. For this purpose, a new method of object oriented management and an arrangement method which classifies data according to different viewpoints are introduced into the management of these annotational information. By these new methods, a high performance annotational management method, which has few dependence to each media and which enables easy hierarchical retrieval was realized. In this paper, we introduce the contents of object oriented annotational information management method, and result of applying them to the real multimedia mapping system.