Querying Multimedia Documents By Spatiotemporal Structure

. Interactive multimedia documents are rapidly becoming available on the WWW. Navigating in such large document repositories requires flexible retrieval techniques based on spatiotemporal structure. In this paper we address this issue by extending the notion of conceptual neighborhood (a concept describing similarity among relations between time intervals) to various resolution levels and higher dimensions. We propose a binary string encoding of relations which allows the automatic derivation of similarity measures and apply our framework for effective support of multimedia queries. 1 Introduction There is nowadays an abundance of multimedia documents on the WWW, from simple HTML pages to complex multimedia presentations. Current IT users are confronted with huge amounts of information, originating from various sources and containing several forms of data ranging from text to sounds, slide shows etc. In the sequel, the term "multimedia document" (or simply document) will be overloaded..