The evolution and the development of "kansei" keywords

The word "kansei" originally means "sensitivity" in Japanese. A somewhat di fferent and expanded meaning of this word began to be used in Japan, at fir st in the area of marketing, in 1984. Gradually it had been used in various fields, and eventually became a buzzword of the 1980s. "Kansei" is an inte ntionally ambiguous word, meaning some ambiguous and illogical way of accep ting sensible objects, something like "feeling", "sensitivity", and "impres sion" in English. In 1990s, the concept of "kansei" was introduced to information retrieval r esearch. Experiments with "kansei" keywords consisting of adjectives, have been carried out for the retrieval of pictures and music. Normally steps of constructing and retrieving a "kansei" database are as follows: (1)to assign "kansei" keywords to images manually; (2) to relate the "kanse i" keywords thus assigned with the characteristics lex. color) extracted fr om the images; (3) to create a database consisting of images, their charact eristics and "kansei" keywords; (4) to retrieve images with "kansei" keywor ds. Many experiments have shown that such a method of creating databases achiev es the optimal performance in small size databases. Thus, it will be most p robable that it cannot be applied to operational databases.