Searching for Flash Movies on the Web: A Content and Context Based Framework

The phenomenal growth of online Flash movies in recent years has made Flash one of the most prevalent media formats on the Web. The retrieval and management issues of Flash, vital to the utilization of the enormous Flash resource, are unfortunately overlooked by the research community. This paper presents the first piece of work (to the best of our knowledge) in this domain by suggesting an integrated framework for the retrieval of Flash movies based on their content characteristics as well as contextual information. The proposed approach consists of two major components: (1) a content-based retrieval component, which explores the characteristics of Flash movie content at compositional and semantic levels; and (2) a context-based retrieval component, which explores the contextual information including the texts and hyperlinks surrounding the movies. An experimental Flash search engine system has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested framework. The work described in this paper was supported substantially by a grant (Project No. 7001457), and partially by another grant (Project No. 7001564), both from CityU of Hong Kong.