A media agent for automatically building a personalized semantic index of Web media objects

A novel idea of media agent is briefly presented, which can automatically build a personalized semantic index of Web media objects for each particular user. Because the Web is a rich source of multimedia data and the text content on the Web pages is usually semantically related to those media objects on the same pages, the media agent can automatically collect the URLs and related text, and then build the index of the multimedia data, on behalf of the user whenever and wherever she accesses these multimedia data or their container Web pages. Moreover, the media agent can also use an off-line crawler to build the index for those multimedia objects that are relevant to the userʹs favorites but have not accessed by the user yet. When the user wants to find these multimedia data once again, the semantic index facilitates text-based search for her.