Position Statement:
Arif Ghafoor
School of Electrical and Computer Engr.
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN, 47907
Suggested research initiative (for group 1): multimedia information
management
Emerging multimedia technology is expected to provide enormous opportunities
for developing large scale information infrastructures to support variety
of
applications including education, medicine, manufacturing, industrial
control
and management, e-commerce, GIS, tourism, entertainment, and business.
These
applications are intended to allow distributed users to access large
repositories of multimedia documents. These documents can be
composed of
different types of data including text, audio, image and video data.
We face
several technical challenges in developing viable multimedia database
systems
to build such applications. These challenges encompass the complete
life-cycle
of multimedia documents, including authoring, management, delivery
and
presentation and need to be addressed in a coherent manner. Since
the search
space for multimedia information can increase with the size of repositories,
it is imperative to develop systems that provide intelligent and scalable
search and access mechanisms. In my opinion, one of the areas of thrust
for
NSF IDM is multimedia information management. In particular,
content-modeling of different media, developing novel searching and
indexing
mechanisms for complex multimedia objects and documents over the Web,
designing
storage models for multimedia information are some of the major technical
issues, requiring serious research efforts.