- 1 - Conceptual Title Abstractions : Modeling and Querying Very Large

Organised units of interactive multimedia material, called “titles”, are becoming rapidly available beyond their original format, namely Compact Disks, and they appear in Digital Libraries and on the Web. For large collections of such titles, browsers and query mechanisms addressing the multimedia assets alone while reasonably well developed are inadequate: we lack techniques for efficient generic retrieval of structured multimedia information. In this paper we present the notion of conceptual title abstractions, a representation of one or more titles that captures and abstracts at a variable level of detail the structure, interactivity and generic content of the represented titles. We develop an algebra for title abstractions -which form a partial orderand present a language which can be used for specifying and abstracting titles. A straightforward extension of the language can be used to query databases of title abstractions, and indirectly very large repositories of organised interactive multimedia material. Examples taken from applied projects illustrate the approach, as the language was originally developed for the specification and production of multimedia titles in series.