A media agent for automatically building a personalized semantic index of Web media objects

A novel idea of media agent is briefly presented, which can automatically b uild a personalized semantic index of Web media objects for each particular user. Because the Web is a rich source of multimedia data and the text con tent on the Web pages is usually semantically related to those media object s on the same pages, the media agent can automatically collect the URLs and related text, and then build the index of the multimedia data, on behalf o f the user whenever and wherever she accesses these multimedia data or thei r container Web pages. Moreover, the media agent can also use an off-line c rawler to build the index for those multimedia objects that are relevant to the user's favorites but have not accessed by the user yet. When the user wants to find these multimedia data once again, the semantic index facilita tes text-based search for her.