Electronic Roads in the Information Society

The objective of this study is to investigate an approach for dynamic construction of Electronic Roads. We envision Electronic Roads spanning a virtual multidimensional space, a distributed digital information repository, comprising primarily of video data of cultural heritage. A visitor (user) will be able to travel in this multidimensional space along different, semantically related historical, geographical, economic or cultural paths. Consider the following example. At a particular point in time our visitor (user) is located at a node of this multidimensional space and s/he has to decide how to proceed with his/her journey. A cluster of nearest neighbours is computed and presented to the user based on the current node but also the most recently visited nodes in order to postulate as to which semantic path the visitor is actually following. Even though the next node along this path has precedence the user will have the option to override this, thus migrating to a different path. The building block of the system is the information unit, which consists of the actual data (e.g. segment of video, image, sound or text) with an attached metadata index. All information units are elementary in granularity. That is, there is no hierarchical structure. The repository of information can be viewed as a pool of information units. There is of course a tradeoff as to what will be precisely the level of granularity, i.e. how elementary the information units will be. The more elementary the information units are the more flexibility the system has to adapt dynamically to the user needs, but of course the overall set of activities incur more overhead. On the other hand, the more coarse grain the information units are the easier it is to retrieve them and combine them but flexibility is limited. The structure of the metadata index is central to the system design. The metadata index would therefore consist of four principal entries one for each subspace.