Multimedia Search Technologies

One of the most ubiquitous activities related to learning in the digital age is “search”. In recent years, computers have rapidly evolved from numeric and text processing to include multimedia, specifically audio, video, and images. However, few methods exist for searching multimedia, apart from textbased strategies operating on keywords, metadata and filenames. Creating text descriptions for multimedia is resourceconsuming and problematic. For example, sounds are difficult to describe in words and as a result, audio collections have been largely inaccessible. This paper will review the different technologies, including open source tools, which have been developed to facilitate multimedia searches. Many of these are based on some form of pattern recognition, and nontextual user input. These tools, though not widely utilized in the world of learning, have tremendous potential to facilitate access to, and reuse of, multimedia, offering benefits to learners and instructional developers.