Multimedia Database Support for Digital Libraries

Digital libraries are a key technology of the coming years allowing the effective use of the Internet for research and personal information. National initiatives for digital libraries have been started in several countries, including the DLI initiative in USA [http://www-sal.cs.uiuc.edu/~sharad/cs491/dli.html], GlobalInfo [http://www.global-info.org/index.html.en] in Germany, and comparable activities in Japan and other European countries.

A digital library allows the access to huge amounts of documents, where documents themselves have a considerably large size. This requires the use of advanced database technology for building a digital library. Besides text documents, a digital library contains multimedia documents of several kinds, for example audio documents, video sequences, digital maps and animations. All these document classes may have specific retrieval methods, storage requirements and Quality of Service parameters for using them in a digital library.

The topic of the seminar is the support of such multimedia digital libraries by database technology. This support includes object database technology for managing document structure, imprecise query technologies for example based on fuzzy logic, integration of information retrieval in database management, object-relational databases with multimedia extensions, meta data management, and distributed storage.

The seminar is intended to bring together researchers from different areas like object and multimedia databases, information retrieval, distributed systems, and digital libraries. It is the intention of this seminar to clarify differences in terminology between these areas, to analyze the state of the art, discuss requirements of digital libraries for multimedia databases and to identify future trends in research and development.

The seminar should therefore focus on two major questions:

• Which functions of digital libraries need database support?
• What can database techniques offer to support these digital library functions?

These major questions can be detailed to specific topics, which list the technological areas relevant for this seminar (this list is of course not exhaustive):

How to support digital libraries?

• Document Servers
• Supporting Different Types of Documents in Database Systems
• Document Acquisition and Interchange
• Extending Object-Relational and Object-Oriented Database Technology for Digital Libraries
• Storing, Indexing, and Querying Large Sets of Documents
• Integration of Heterogeneous Meta data and Documents
• Combining Querying on Structured Meta data and Content-based Retrieval
• Integrating Vague and Fuzzy Queries
• Distribution of Queries
• Different User Views on Large Sets of Documents
• Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries

Which features of digital libraries need database support?

• Alerting Services
• Intelligent User Agents, Personal Digital Libraries
• High Performance Document Servers
• Efficient Retrieval Functionality
• Document Delivery and Data Dissemination
• Security and User Access Models
• Trusted Document Servers

The seminar is scheduled close to the International Conference on Very Large Databases 1999 (VLDB'99 [http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~vldb99/scotland.htm]), which will take place in Edinburgh (UK) the week after the Dagstuhl seminar.