Multimedia Indexing over the Web

There has been work on database systems that can retrieve multimedia objects by their content. We are extending this work by using the World Wide Web as source and storage for multimedia objects much like current text search engines do for textual information. A system that can access all types of multimedia objects by their content is a formidable task and improvements are constantly being made to indexing techniques. We have taken an important rst step in demonstrating the viability of this technique while laying the groundwork for a larger, more capable system. We have implemented a simple indexing scheme while concentrating on building the infrastructure to support this system. Our system can retrieve references to images on the WWW, index those images, and store those images using spatial access methods. We then use query by example to nd a set of images on the WWW that resemble our query image. Due to its design, it is easy to include additional context features, to substitute diierent indexing schemes, and add other types of multimedia to our system like time sequences, voice and video.