Automatic index construction for multimedia digital libraries

Indexing remains one of the most popular tools provided by digital libraries to help users identify and understand the characteristics of the information they need. Despite extensive studies of the problem of automatic index construction for text-based digital libraries, the construction of multimedia digital libraries continues to represent a challenge, because multimedia objects usually lack sufficient text information to ensure reliable index learning. This research attempts to tackle the problem of automatic index construction for multimedia objects by employing Web usage logs and limited keywords pertaining to multimedia objects. The tests of two proposed algorithms use two different data sets with different amounts of textual information. Web usage logs offer precious information for building indexes of multimedia digital libraries with limited textual information. The proposed methods generally yield better indexes, especially for the artwork data set.