Publication Framework for Content-Based Search in Heterogeneous Distributed Multimedia Databases

Search for multimedia content by the large public is expected to experience at least two major evolutions in the near future: addition of content-based criteria to those issued from textual metadata and significant increase in the volume of digitized content available at each provider. In this context, most providers will need a local index in order to search in their own database. We argue that the local indexes are unlikely to be all of the same type and that many providers want full control over their local index. To support these requirements in a flexible and scalable way, we outline a framework based on the publication by every provider, in a consensual format, of representatives associated to those parts of the local index where the provider intends to make content “findable” by others. The representatives published by all the providers serve to build a global distributed index employed for answering content-based similarity