Geomedia resource discovery and retrieval project

本研究旨在探讨在互联网上访问各种地理媒体内容的有效和高效技术。地理媒体内容是指与地理领域相关的多媒体内容(文本、图片和图像、视频、声音)。为了在分布式环境下高效地搜索基于GeoMedia的内容，我们构建了一个元级别的系统，该系统汇总了从GeoMedia中提取的元数据。这些元数据是分层累积的。该研究的目标是建立一个能够根据最终用户的兴趣方便地访问GeoMedia数据的系统，该项目在GeoMedia数据库的基础上产生了一个元级系统。主要成果是(1)创建了地理图像的多尺度表示(多维)方法，(2)创建了能够检测任意形状的多维图像数据的集群的新的聚类方法，(3)构建了元数据模型，该元数据模型使得能够形成集成系统所需的元数据以将可视查询定向到相关的GeoMedia数据库，(4)创建了基于元数据的数据库选择方法的理论基础，以及(5)创建了集成了从可视数据内容中提取的异类特征的可视查询处理组件。结果平台包括元服务器组件，该元服务器组件包括分层元数据库，元搜索代理和查询管理器。根据用户的反馈对系统的性能进行了优化。同时，查询管理器提取查询中的文本、纹理和颜色等异质特征进行元数据的匹配，根据单个特征对子查询进行形式化，并将子查询的结果整合到最终的数据库选择决策中。

This research aimed to investigate effective and efficient technique for accessing to various GEOMEDIA contents via the Internet. Geomedia content is related to Multimedia contents relevant to the geography field (texts, pictures and images, video, sounds). In order to search efficiently inside GEOMEDIA based contents in distributed environment, we built a meta-level system which summarizes the meta data extracted from GEOMEDIA. These metadata are accumulated hierarchically. The target of the research was to built a system which can access to GEOMEDIA data easily according to end-user own interests.The project produced a meta-level system on top of geomedia databases. The major achievements are (1) the creation of multi-scale representation (multidimensional) methods for geographic images, (2) the creation of novel clustering approaches that can detect clusters of arbitrary shape of multidimensional image data, (3) the construction of a metadata model that enables the formulation of metadata that are needed for the integrated system to direct a visual query to relevant GEOMEDIA databases, (4) the creation of the theoretical foundation of database selection approaches based on the metadata, and (5) the creation of a visual query processing component that integrates heterogeneous features extracted from the content of visual data.The result platform includes a metaserver component including a hierarchical metadatabase, a metasearch agent, and a query manager. The performance of the system has been refined based on user's feedbacks. Also the query manager extracts heterogeneous features such as text, texture, and color in the query for suitable matching of the metadata.Subqueries have been formulated based on individual features.The query manager integrates the results from the subqueres into the final database selection decision.