Tiziana Catarci - Böcker

This exploration of concepts, tools, and techniques for both visual interfaces to database systems and management of visual data, provides intensive discussion of original research contributions and practical system design, implementation, and evaluation. The topics covered in detail are: video retrieval; information visualization; modelling and recognition; image similarity retrieval and clustering; spatio-temporal databases; visual querying; and visual user interfaces. The book also includes invited lectures by recognized leaders in the fields of user interfaces and multimedia database systems. These topics within the main themes of the book are intended to lay the seeds for fruitful discussions on the future development of visual information management. The book comprises the proceedings of the Fifth Working Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB5), held in Fukuoka, Japan, in May 2000, and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing.

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index­ ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995) (Kobla et aI. , 1997). Through the inte­ gration of technologies such as image processing, speech/character recognition and natural language understanding, keywords can be extracted and associated with these shots for indexing (Wactlar et aI. , 1996). A single shot, however, rarely carries enough amount of information to be meaningful by itself. Usu­ ally, it is a semantically meaningful interval that most users are interested in re­ trieving. Generally, such meaningful intervals span several consecutive shots. There hardly exists any efficient and reliable technique, either automatic or manual, to identify all semantically meaningful intervals within a video stream. Works by (Smith and Davenport, 1992) (Oomoto and Tanaka, 1993) (Weiss et aI. , 1995) (Hjelsvold et aI. , 1996) suggest manually defining all such inter­ vals in the database in advance. However, even an hour long video may have an indefinite number of meaningful intervals. Moreover, video data is multi­ interpretative. Therefore, given a query, what is a meaningful interval to an annotator may not be meaningful to the user who issues the query. In practice, manual indexing of meaningful intervals is labour intensive and inadequate.

Table of Contents: Why User-Centered / The Early Days: Visual Query Systems / Beyond Querying / More Advanced Applications / Non-Visual Interfaces / Conclusions

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2012, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2012. The 14 papers and 3 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Furthermore, the books contains 2 keynote papers. The papers are organized in topical sections named: benchmarking and evaluation initiatives; information access; and evaluation methodologies and infrastructure.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, held in Rome, Italy, in January/February 2013. The 18 full papers presented together with an invited paper and a panel paper were selected from extended versions of the presentations given at the conference. The papers then went through an additional round of reviewing and revision after the event. The papers are organized in topical sections on information access; Digital Library (DL) architecture; DL projects; semantics and DLs; models and evaluation for DLs; DL applications; discussing DL perspectives.