Adapting Indexation to the Content, Context and Queries Characteristics in Distributed Multimedia Systems

Due to the dramatically increasing amount of multimedia contents in several application domains, effective and flexible solutions for distributed data indexation are essential. In the management of these multimedia contents, the indexing process is the most important resource consumer, in terms of data transfer over the network and CPU consumption. As result of our research, we located two points for reducing resource consumption: the limitation of multimedia content transfer over the network for indexing, as well as the reduction of multimedia indexing amount by employing only the most appropriate algorithms for performing indexation, only over the relevant contents. We present in this paper the solution developed in the context of the LINDO project for indexing multimedia content into a distributed system that originally address these two points by reducing as much as possible the resource consumption through (1) a distributed indexing technique that avoids multimedia transfer, (2) a flexible mechanism for selecting the indexing algorithms to be employed on each remote server, according to the multimedia content characteristics, its acquisition context and user queries history.