Domain Independent Integrated Multimedia Data Mining is a Frivolous Exercise: Classicism vs. Connectionism Debate Revisited

In this paper the classicist and the connectionist debate is integrated in a multimedia data mining framework. Due to the ready availability of visual information digitally, the problem to store, retrieve and organize images is gaining tremendous importance and poses a serious challenge for practitioners of AI and databases alike. The central problem for image database management is the idea of an annotation associated with every image. This idea of an annotation as a representation of an image is explored in this paper. The claim is that arriving at a suitable annotation using data mining techniques however does not solve the problem of representation and reference. Most image annotation techniques are classicist, while connectionist approaches which have the advantage of contextuality have not been explored much because of the problem of systematicity. Consequently the image annotation problem can be used as a critique of both.