A model for secure multimedia document database system in a distributed environment

The Internet provides a universal platform for large-scale distribution of information and supports inter-organizational services, system integration, and collaboration. Use of multimedia documents for dissemination and sharing of massive amounts of information is becoming a common practice for Internet-based applications and enterprises. With the rapid proliferation of multimedia data management technologies over the Internet, there is growing concern about security and privacy of information. Composing multimedia documents in a distributed heterogeneous environment involves integrating media objects from multiple security domains that may employ different access control policies for media objects. In this paper, we present a security model for distributed document management system that allows creation, storage, indexing, and presentation of secure multimedia documents. The model is based on a time augmented Petri-net and provides a flexible, multilevel access control mechanism that allows clearance-based access to different levels of information in a document. In addition, the model provides detailed multimedia synchronization requirements including deterministic and non-deterministic temporal relations and incomplete timing information among media objects.     

MING-I: a distributed interactive multimedia document development mechanism

The next generation of interactive multimedia documents can contain both static media, e.g., text, graph, image, and continuous media, e.g., audio and video, and can provide user interactions in distributed environments. However, the temporal information of multimedia documents cannot be described using traditional document structures, e.g., Open Document Architecture (ODA) and Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML); the continuous transmission of media units also raises some new synchronization problems, which have not been met before, for processing user interactions. Thus, developing a distributed interactive multimedia document system should resolve the issues of document model, presentation control architecture, and control scheme. In this paper, we (i) propose a new multimedia document model that contains the logical structure, the layout structure, and the temporal structure to formally describe multimedia documents, and (ii) point out main interaction-based synchronization problems, and propose a control architecture and a token-based control scheme to solve these interaction-based synchronization problems. Based on the proposed document model, control architecture, and control scheme, a distributed interactive multimedia document development mechanism, which is called MING-I, is developed on SUN workstations.     

Information Retrieval and Filtering of Multimedia Mineral Data

Most of the written materials are consisted of Multimedia (MM) information because beside text usually contain image information. The present information retrieval and filtering systems use only text parts of the documents or in best case images represented by keywords or image captions. Why do not use both, text and image features of the documents and in the retrieval or filtering process utilize more completely the document information content? Can such approach increase the effectiveness of retrieval and filtering processes? There is a very little difference between retrieval and filtering at an abstract level. In this paper, we will discuss some possible similarities and differences between them on the application level taking into account the experiments in retrieval and filtering of multimedia mineral information.     

Feature pattern based representation of multimedia documents for efficient knowledge discovery

The rapid growth of multimedia documents has raised huge demand for sophisticated multimedia knowledge discovery systems. The knowledge extraction of the documents mainly relies on the data representation model and the document representation model. As the multimedia document comprised of multimodal multimedia objects, the data representation depends on modality of the objects. The multimodal objects require distinct processing and feature extraction methods resulting in different features with different dimensionalities. Managing multiple types of features is challenging for knowledge extraction tasks. The unified representation of multimedia document benefits the knowledge extraction process, as they are represented by same type of features. The appropriate document representation will benefit the overall decision making process by reducing the search time and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a domain converting method known as Multimedia to Signal converter (MSC) to represent the multimodal multimedia document in an unified representation by converting multimodal objects as signal objects. A tree based approach known as Multimedia Feature Pattern (MFP) tree is proposed for the compact representation of multimedia documents in terms of features of multimedia objects. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated by performing the experiments on four multimodal datasets. Experimental results show that the unified representation of multimedia documents helped in improving the classification accuracy for the documents. The MFP tree based representation of multimedia documents not only reduces the search time and memory requirements, also outperforms the competitive approaches for search and retrieval of multimedia documents.     

Adlet: an active document abstraction for multimedia informationfusion

A new approach is described for the fusion of multimedia information based on the concept of active documents advertising on the Internet, whereby the metadata of a document travels in the network to seek out documents of interest to the parent document and, at the same time, advertises its parent document to other interested documents. This abstraction of metadata is called an adlet, which is the core of our approach. Two important features make this approach applicable to multimedia information fusion, information retrieval, data mining, geographic information systems, and medical information systems: 1) any document, including a Web page, database record, video file, audio file, image and even paper documents, can be enhanced by an adlet and become an active document; and 2) any node in a nonactive network can be enhanced by adlet-savvy software and the adlet-enhanced node can coexist with other nonenhanced nodes. An experimental prototype provides a testbed for feasibility studies in a hybrid active network     

Management of Multi-structured Hypermedia Documents: A Data Model,Query Language,and Indexing Scheme

Structured documents have gained popularity with the advent of documentstructure markupstandards such as SGML, ODA, HyTime, and HTML.Document management systems can provide powerful facilities by maintaining thestructure information of documents.Since the hypermediadocument is also a kind of structured document, wecan apply the results of many studies, whichhave been performed in storing, retrieving, and managing structured documents,to the hypermedia document management.However, more factors should be considered in handling hypermedia documentsbecause they contain multimedia data and also have multiple complex structuressuch as hyperlink networks and spatial/temporal layout structures as well aslogical structures.In this paper, we propose an object-oriented model for multi-structuredhypermediadocuments and multimedia data, and a query language for retrievinghypermedia document elements based on the content and multiple complexstructures.By using unique element identifiers and an indexing scheme whichexploits multiple structures,we can process queries efficiently with minimal storage overheadfor maintaining structure information.     

基于剪贴板监控的电子文档多级保护

电子文档保护是信息防泄漏的重要内容。在对现有电子文档保护技术分析的基础上,提出一种基于剪贴板监控的电子文档多级保护技术。针对传统剪贴板监控在文档保护方面的不足,提出一种可获得文档路径的剪贴板监控策略;根据不同应用对文档保护的不同需求,提出一种动态可调的文档分级保护策略;基于剪贴板监控所获得信息完成对文档的实时动态保护,并设计实现相应的原型系统。实验结果表明,所提出的基于剪贴板监控的电子文档保护能够根据文档保护需求防止文档内容通过剪贴板泄露。     

多媒体对象的组织与结构化检索

多媒体的结构化检索具有广泛的应用前景，但多媒体的检索技术尚不成熟。多媒体数据模型的复杂性，连续媒体基于内容检索的低效，以及缺乏适用的查询语言，都使得多媒体检索困难重重。英国肯特大学新近研制的多媒体检索系统在多媒体检索的相关领域取得了一定的突破。这个系统把用户视图中的多媒体对象组织成具有层次结构的虚拟数据库，使用属性来标识数据库中多媒体对象索引的特征；查询代理机允许用户直观地构造查询过程－包括一个结     

A structure-based approach for multimedia information filtering

While multimedia documents are sequentially presented to users, an information filtering (IF) system is useful to achieve a good retrieval performance in terms of both quality and efficiency. Conventional approaches for designing an IF system are based on the user's evaluation on information relevance degree (IRD), but ignore other attributes in system design such as relative importance of the data in a collection of multimedia documents. In this paper, we aim at developing a framework of designing structure-based multimedia IF systems, which incorporates the characteristics of the importance and relevance of multimedia documents. A method of calculating the values of relative importance degree of multimedia documents is proposed. Furthermore, these values are combined into the IRD of multimedia documents to improve the representation of user profiles. An illustrative example is given to demonstrate the proposed techniques.     

An information filtering model on the Web and its application in JobAgent

Machine-learning techniques play the important roles for information filtering. The main objective of machine-learning is to obtain users' profiles. To decrease the burden of on-line learning, it is important to seek suitable structures to represent user information needs. This paper proposes a model for information filtering on the Web. The user information need is described into two levels in this model: profiles on category level, and Boolean queries on document level. To efficiently estimate the relevance between the user information need and documents, the user information need is treated as a rough set on the space of documents. The rough set decision theory is used to classify the new documents according to the user information need. In return for this, the new documents are divided into three parts: positive region, boundary region, and negative region. An experimental system JobAgent is also presented to verify this model, and it shows that the rough set based model can provide an efficient approach to solve the information overload problem.     

由西门子利多富和思爱普公司共同成立之德国社会市场经济基金会向浙江大学信息与管理软件中心提供捐赠

由西门子利多富和思爱普公司共同成立之德国社会市场经济基金会向浙江大学信息与管理软件中心提供捐赠德国社会市场经济基金会于浙江大学百年校庆之际，向浙江大学信息与管理软件中心捐赠软硬件设备。德国社会市场经济基金会是由德国西门子利多富（ＳＮＩ）和思爱普（ＳＡ...     

Multimedia Clip Generation From Documents for Browsing on Mobile Devices

Small displays on mobile handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones, are the bottlenecks for usability of most content browsing applications. Generally, conventional content such as documents and Web pages need to be modified for effective presentation on mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel visualization for documents, called multimedia thumbnails, which consists of text and image content converted into playable multimedia clips. A multimedia thumbnail utilizes visual and audio channels of small portable devices as well as both spatial and time dimensions to communicate text and image information of a single document. The proposed algorithm for generating multimedia thumbnails includes 1) a semantic document analysis step, where salient content from a source document is extracted; 2) an optimization step, where a subset of this extracted content is selected based on time, display, and application constraints; and 3) a composition step, where the selected visual and audible document content is combined into a multimedia thumbnail. Scalability of MMNails that allows generation of multimedia clips of various lengths is also described. A user study is presented that evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed multimedia thumbnail visualization.     

Table form document analysis based on the document structure grammar

Structure analysis of table form documents is an important issue because a printed document and even an electronic document do not provide logical structural information but merely geometrical layout and lexical information. To handle these documents automatically, logical structure information is necessary. In this paper, we first analyze the elements of the form documents from a communication point of view and retrieve the grammatical elements that appear in them. Then, we present a document structure grammar which governs the logical structure of the form documents. Finally, we propose a structure analysis system of the table form documents based on the grammar. By using grammar notation, we can easily modify and keep it consistent, as the rules are relatively simple. Another advantage of using grammar notation is that it can be used for generating documents only from logical structure. In our system, documents are assumed to be composed of a set of boxes and they are classified as seven box types. Then the box relations between the indication box and its associated entry box are analyzed based on the semantic and geometric knowledge defined in the document structure grammar. Experimental results have shown that the system successfully analyzed several kinds of table forms.     

Semantic processing of multimedia data for e-government applications

Knowledge management has become a challenge for almost all e-government applications where the efficient processing of large amounts of data is still a critical issue. In the last years, semantic techniques have been introduced to improve the full automatic digitalization process of documents, in order to facilitate the access to the information embedded in very large document repositories. In this paper, we present a novel model for multimedia digital documents aiming at improve effectiveness of digitalization activities within an information system supporting e-government organizations. At the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is one of the first attempts to give a single and unified characterization of multimedia documents managed by e-government applications, whereas semantic procedures and multimedia facilities are used for the transformation of unstructured documents into structured information. Furthermore, we define an architecture for the management of multimedia documents “life cycle”, which provides advanced functionalities for information extraction, semantic retrieval, indexing, storage, presentation, together with long-term preservation. Preliminary experiments concerning an e-health scenario are finally presented and discussed.     

An Experimental Ontology Server for an Information Grid Environment

Semantic web and grid technologies offer a promising approach to facilitate semantic information retrieval based on heterogeneous document repositories. In this paper the authors describe the design and implementation of an Ontology Server (OS) component to be used in a distributed contents management grid system. Such a system could be used to build collection document repositories, mutually interoperable at the semantic level. From the contents point of view, the distributed system is built as a collection of multimedia documents repository nodes glued together by an OS. A set of methodologies and tools to organize the knowledge space around the notion of contents community is developed, where each content provider will publish a set of ontologies to collect metadata information organized and published through a knowledge community, built on top of the OS. These methodologies were deployed while setting up a prototype to connect about 20 museums in the city of Naples (Italy).     

An alternative,layout‐driven approach to the clustering of documents

Internet has become a huge repository of information and knowledge, based on the sharing of the electronic documents. Last trends in knowledge management focus on the knowledge representation based on the document content. In fact, most accustomed approaches achieve the document understanding by analyzing the “portions of information'' in the document which describe the content, through techniques of text parsing and extraction. This paper presents an alternative approach that departs from the consolidated techniques of document management and focuses on the logical structure of a PDF document as a discriminating source of document knowledge. The main idea is based on the fact, when the reader looks at a paper, his first perception is related to the layout of the document. The analysis of layout, typesetting, paginating, and graphical arrangement of a document provides interesting information about its content understanding; in general, the documents that are in the same category present similar page layout, fonts, and figures arrangement. In this sense, this work presents an alternative way to deal with documents recognition and understanding, through the analysis of the layout of electronic PDF documents and their classification. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

机器学习与网络信息处理

机器学习在网络信息处理中占有重要地位。GHunt是一个采用多项机器学习技术的网络信息智能获取与处理系统。首先,这一系统支持分布式的网络信息并行搜索与内容过滤;其次,采用机器学习技术,包括文本分类、聚类,文本概念抽取,从概念层次理解文本信息;再次,基于概念语义空间有效地统一文本信息管理;最后提供高效的基于概念语义的文本信息检索,以及个性化的专题组织与信息推送服务。文中着重阐述了系统中所用到的机器学习技术。