A metadata repository system for an efficient description of visual multimedia documents

With the continuing explosion of multimedia information in today's society, searching for multimedia information by the contents of interest is becomi ng more demanding. It will require an efficient metadata modeling scheme an d ease-of-use querying mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new metadata description scheme for image and video data which employs the well-defined formality of the Dublin Core description to describe the semantic feature p art and the powerful facility of the MPEG-7 description to describe the vis ual and media feature part of visual information all in the XML/DTD form. I t will benefit both Dublin Core users who desire to describe multimedia in their textual documents and MPEG-7 users who want to describe semantic feat ures more formally using Dublin Core structure. The proposed scheme is used in the development of a metadata repository system called MRS for an easy XML/DTD manipulation of complex multimedia document description. MRS provid es an easy-of-use user interface as a DTD editor and dictionary function to generate a uniform construct of multimedia document description according to the proposed scheme. This work has been conducted as a partial developme nt of the Visual Information Repository System (VIRS) which is presently im plemented under the project funding of a university-industry collaboration research program.