Description-Based Multimedia Clipart Retrieval in WWW

The Internet today is teemed with not only text data but also other media such as sound, still and moving images in a variety of formats. Unlike text, however, that can be retrieved easily with the help of numerous search engines, there has been few way to access data of other media unless the exact location or the URL is known. Multimedia data in the WWW are contained in or linked via anchors in the hyper-documents. They can most reliably be retrieved by analyzing the binary data content, which is far from being practical yet by the current state of the art. Instead we present another technique of searching based on textual descriptions which are found at or around the multimedia objects. The textual description used in this research includes file name (URL), anchor text and its context, alternative descriptions found in ALT HTML tage. These are actually the clues assumedly relevant to the contents. Although not without a possibility of missing or misinterpreting images and sounds, the description-based search is highly practical in terms of computation. The prototype search engine will soon be deployed to the public service through the prestige search engine, InfoDetective, in Korea.