MIND: An architecture for multimedia information retrieval in federated digital libraries

MIND (which we are currently developing in an EU project) is an end-to-end solution for federated digital libraries which covers all these issues. We start from information retrieval approaches which focus on retrieval quality, but mostly only consider monomedial and homogeneous sources. We will extend these approaches for dealing with different kinds of media (text, facts, images and transcripts of speech recognition) as well as handling heterogeneous libraries (e.g., with different schemas). Another innovation is that MIND also considers non-co-operating libraries which only provide the query interface.