CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

DART: the distributed agent based retrieval toolkit

The technology of search engines is evolving from indexing and classification of web resources based on keywords to more sophisticated techniques which take into account the meaning and the context of textual information and usage. Replying to query, commercial search engines face the user requests with a large amount of results, mostly useless or only partially related to the request; the subsequent refinement, operated downloading and examining as much pages as possible and simply ignoring whatever stays behind the first few pages, is left up to the user. Furthermore, architectures based on centralized indexes, allow commercial search engines to control the advertisement of online information, in contrast to P2P architectures that focus the attention on user requirements involving the end user in search engine maintenance and operation. To address such wishes, new search engines should focus on three key aspects: semantics, geo-referencing, collaboration/distribution. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Collaboration distributes storage, processing, and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. In this paper, we describe the studies, the concepts and the solutions developed in the DART project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Combining MAS and P2P Systems: The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (ATMAS)

The seamless retrieval of information distributed across networks has been one of the key goals of many systems. Early solutions involved the use of single static agents which would retrieve the unfiltered data and then process it. However, this was deemed costly and inefficient in terms of the bandwidth since complete files need to be downloaded when only a single value is often all that is required. As a result, mobile agents were developed to filter the data in situ before returning it to the user. However, mobile agents have their own associated problems, namely security and control. The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (AT-MAS) has been developed to provide the remote processing and filtering capabilities but without the need for mobile code. It is implemented as a Peer to Peer (P2P) network of static intelligent cooperating agents, each of which control one or more data sources. This dissertation describes the two key technologies have directly influenced the design of ATMAS, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). P2P systems are conceptually simple, but limited in power, whereas MAS are significantly more complex but correspondingly more powerful. The resulting system exhibits the power of traditional MAS systems while retaining the simplicity of P2P systems. The dissertation describes the system in detail and analyses its performance

A collaborative, semantic and context-aware search engine

Search engines help people to find information in the largest public knowledge system of the world: the Web. Unfortunately its size makes very complex to discover the right information. The users are faced lots of useless results forcing them to select one by one the most suitable. The new generation of search engines evolve from keyword-based indexing and classification to more sophisticated techniques considering the meaning, the context and the usage of information. We argue about the three key aspects: collaboration, geo-referencing and semantics. Collaboration distributes storage, processing and trust on a world-wide network of nodes running on users’ computers, getting rid of bottlenecks and central points of failures. The geo-referencing of catalogued resources allows contextualisation based on user position. Semantic analysis lets to increase the results relevance. In this paper, we expose the studies, the concepts and the solutions of a research project to introduce these three key features in a novel search engine architecture.213-21