Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio

List of clustered permutations in secondary memory for proximity searching

Similarity search is a difficult problem and various indexing schemas have been defined to process similarity queries efficiently in many applications, including multimedia databases and other repositories handling complex objects. Metric indices support efficient similarity searches, but most of them are designed for main memory. Thus, they can handle only small datasets, suffering serious performance degradations when the objects reside on disk. Most reallife database applications require indices able to work on secondary memory. Among a plethora of indices, the List of Clustered Permutations (LCP) has shown to be competitive in main memory.We introduce a secondary-memory variant of the LCP, which maintains the low number of distance evaluations when comparing the permutations themselves, and also needs a low number of I/O operations at construction and searching.Facultad de Informátic

PARALIGN: rapid and sensitive sequence similarity searches powered by parallel computing technology

PARALIGN is a rapid and sensitive similarity search tool for the identification of distantly related sequences in both nucleotide and amino acid sequence databases. Two algorithms are implemented, accelerated Smith–Waterman and ParAlign. The ParAlign algorithm is similar to Smith–Waterman in sensitivity, while as quick as BLAST for protein searches. A form of parallel computing technology known as multimedia technology that is available in modern processors, but rarely used by other bioinformatics software, has been exploited to achieve the high speed. The software is also designed to run efficiently on computer clusters using the message-passing interface standard. A public search service powered by a large computer cluster has been set-up and is freely available at , where the major public databases can be searched. The software can also be downloaded free of charge for academic use

List of clustered permutations in secondary memory for proximity searching

Similarity search is a difficult problem and various indexing schemas have been defined to process similarity queries efficiently in many applications, including multimedia databases and other repositories handling complex objects. Metric indices support efficient similarity searches, but most of them are designed for main memory. Thus, they can handle only small datasets, suffering serious performance degradations when the objects reside on disk. Most reallife database applications require indices able to work on secondary memory. Among a plethora of indices, the List of Clustered Permutations (LCP) has shown to be competitive in main memory.We introduce a secondary-memory variant of the LCP, which maintains the low number of distance evaluations when comparing the permutations themselves, and also needs a low number of I/O operations at construction and searching.Facultad de Informátic

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio