Multimedia Information Disclosure in a Distributed Environment

Introduction As the ubiquitousness of multimedia information has been encouraging the diversification of the user's need for information, each user may have his own individual requirements regarding both content issues and non-content issues. Examples of the first can be requirements with respect to accuracy, completeness and up-to-dateness. Examples of the latter are requirements regarding data format, processing time and cost. Not only is the information environment heterogeneous and distributed, there are also price tags attached to the different parts of the information chain. The price may depend on many different aspects, such as information quality, connect time, processing time, network usage, etc. Most research thus far has focused on content-based issues. The importance of non-content issues is a direct consequence of the use of multimedia data, and is only slowly being acknowledged. We advocate that an advanced multimedia information retrieval service shou