Geomedia resource discovery and retrieval project

本研究旨在探讨通过互联网访问各种GEOMEDIA内容的有效和高效的技术。几何学内容是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系统，对从GEOMEDIA中提取的元数据进行汇总。这些元数据按层次结构累积。研究的目标是根据最终用户的兴趣，建立一个能够方便地访问GEOMEDIA数据的系统。该项目在几何数据库之上建立了一个元级系统。主要成果有：(1)创建了地理图像的多尺度表示（多维）方法，(2)创建了新的聚类方法，可以检测多维图像数据的任意形状的聚类，(3)构建了元数据模型，使集成系统所需的元数据能够直接对相关的GEOMEDIA数据库进行可视化查询。(4)建立基于元数据的数据库选择方法的理论基础；(5)创建一个可视化查询处理组件，该组件集成了从可视化数据内容中提取的异构特征。结果平台包括一个元服务器组件，该组件包括一个分层元数据库、一个元搜索代理和一个查询管理器。根据用户反馈对系统的性能进行了改进。此外，查询管理器在查询中提取文本、纹理和颜色等异构特性，以便对元数据进行合适的匹配。子查询是基于单个特性制定的。查询管理器将子查询的结果集成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.