Describing multimedia documents in natural and semantic-driven ordered hierarchies

In this work we present the ToCAI (Table of Content-Analytical Index) framework, a Description Scheme (DS) for content description of audio-visual (AV) documents. The idea for such a description scheme comes out from the structures used for indexing technical books (table of content and analytical index). This description scheme provides therefore a hierarchical description of the time sequential structure of a multimedia document (ToC), suitable for browsing, together with an "Analytical Index" (AI) of the key items of the document, suitable for retrieval. The AI allows to represent in a ordered way the items of the AV document which are most relevant from the semantic point of view. The ordering criteria are therefore selected according to the application context. The detailed structure of the DS is presented by means of UML notation as well and an application example is shown.