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.