Slovenian Virtual Gallery on the Internet

The Slovenian Virtual Gallery (SVG) is a World Wide Web based multimedia collection of pictures, text, clickable-maps and video clips presenting Slovenian fine art from the gothic period up to the present days. Part of SVG is a virtual gallery space where pictures hang on the walls while another part is devoted to current exhibitions of selected Slovenian art galleries. The first version of this application was developed in the first half of 1995. It was based on a file system for storing all the data and custom developed software for search, automatic generation of HTML documents, scaling of pictures and remote management of the system. Due to the fast development of Web related tools a new version of SVG was developed in 1997 based on object-oriented relational database server technology. Both implementations are presented and compared in this article with issues related to the transion between the two versions. At the end, we will also discuss some extensions to SVG. We will present the GUI (Graphical User Interface) developed specially for presentation of current exhibitions over the Web which is based on GlobalView panoramic navigation extension to developed Internet Video Server (IVS). And since SVG operates with a lot of image data, we will confront with the problem of Image Content Retrieval

Principles of Multimedia News Systems for Business Applications

In the past few years considerable demand for business oriented multimedia information systems has developed. A multimedia information system is one that can create, import, integrate, store, retrieve, edit, and delete two or more types of media materials in digital form, such as audio, image, full-motion video, and text information. Multimedia information systems play a central role in many business activities. They represent a very special class complex computing systems. This paper surveys a special type of multimedia information systems: multimedia news systems. Multimedia news systems deal with architectures to manage complex multimedia news databases, online presentation and distribution services or the integration of several existing services to meta-services using intelligent news retrieval engines. The leading presentation platform in multimedia news presentation is news networks providing television services and Internet content distribution. The primary focus is on advanced multimedia news systems infrastructure, document standards, application architecture and principles for multimedia news on the Web that suggest long-term trends in this increasingly important area.multimedia, information systems, business applications

An Open Framework for Integrating Widely Distributed Hypermedia Resources

The success of the WWW has served as an illustration of how hypermedia functionality can enhance access to large amounts of distributed information. However, the WWW and many other distributed hypermedia systems offer very simple forms of hypermedia functionality which are not easily applied to existing applications and data formats, and cannot easily incorporate alternative functions which would aid hypermedia navigation to and from existing documents that have not been developed with hypermedia access in mind. This paper describes the extension to a distributed environment of the open hypermedia functionality of the Microcosm system, which is designed to support the provision of hypermedia access to a wide range of source material and application, and to offer straightforward extension of the system to incorporate new forms of information access

The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud \ud Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud \ud Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud \ud First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud \ud Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud \ud Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud \ud We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud \ud We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system

Expressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system as linked data

Library organizations have enthusiastically undertaken semantic web initiatives and in particular the data publishing as linked data. Nevertheless, different surveys report the experimental nature of initiatives and the consumer difficulty in re-using data. These barriers are a hindrance for using linked datasets, as an infrastructure that enhances the library and related information services. This paper presents an approach for encoding, as a Linked Vocabulary, the "tacit" knowledge of the information system that manages the data source. The objective is the improvement of the interpretation process of the linked data meaning of published datasets. We analyzed a digital library system, as a case study, for prototyping the "semantic data management" method, where data and its knowledge are natively managed, taking into account the linked data pillars. The ultimate objective of the semantic data management is to curate the correct consumers' interpretation of data, and to facilitate the proper re-use. The prototype defines the ontological entities representing the knowledge, of the digital library system, that is not stored in the data source, nor in the existing ontologies related to the system's semantics. Thus we present the local ontology and its matching with existing ontologies, Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) and Metadata Objects Description Schema (MODS), and we discuss linked data triples prototyped from the legacy relational database, by using the local ontology. We show how the semantic data management, can deal with the inconsistency of system data, and we conclude that a specific change in the system developer mindset, it is necessary for extracting and "codifying" the tacit knowledge, which is necessary to improve the data interpretation process

A semantic web approach for built heritage representation

In a built heritage process, meant as a structured system of activities aimed at the investigation, preservation, and management of architectural heritage, any task accomplished by the several actors involved in it is deeply influenced by the way the knowledge is represented and shared. In the current heritage practice, knowledge representation and management have shown several limitations due to the difficulty of dealing with large amount of extremely heterogeneous data. On this basis, this research aims at extending semantic web approaches and technologies to architectural heritage knowledge management in order to provide an integrated and multidisciplinary representation of the artifact and of the knowledge necessary to support any decision or any intervention and management activity. To this purpose, an ontology-based system, representing the knowledge related to the artifact and its contexts, has been developed through the formalization of domain-specific entities and relationships between them