An object XML framework for rich media retrieval

Abstract

Rich media is becoming an important component when designing Web pages. It is experiencing a breathtaking growth in recent years, as exemplified by Flash animation movies on the Web, which is gaining widespread usage nowadays. While a lot of efforts have been put on querying text based Web pages, unfortunately, there is very limited research effort dedicated to query Flash movies by content, which is nevertheless critical to the utilization of Flash resources. In this thesis, we present a framework which allows Flash movies to be queried expressively by the end-users. More specifically, we create an OXF (Object XML for Flash) model by converting Flash movies into XML format, followed by annotating spatio-temporal features (XML tags) and converting these tags into persistent objects for later querying purpose. To enhance the performance of OXF model, an indexing technique known as Structural Join Index Hierarchy (SJIH) is adopted and applied to enhance the retrieval of OXF objects. A detailed cost model for query execution through SJIH is developed. Our experimental studies on using SJIH for accessing Flash movies have demonstrated performance advantageous when compared with other indexing techniques.