Resource selection and data fusion for multimedia international digital libraries: an overview of the MIND project

The inspiration for MIND grew out of the problems which users face when they have remote access to thousands of heterogeneous and distributed multimedia digital libraries. A user must know where to search, how to query different media, and how to combine information from diverse resources. As digital libraries continue to proliferate, in a variety of media and from a variety of sources, the problems of resource selection, query formulation and data fusion become major obstacles to effective search and retrieval. The key goal of MIND is to develop a common system for identifying, searching and combining results from multiple digital libraries. MIND, therefore, is investigating methods for resource description and selection (i.e., gathering and updating information about digital libraries to assist in selecting those which are most likely to contain the information sought), query processing (i.e. modifying the terms contained in a query and transforming the query into the local command language), data fusion (i.e., the merging of different data retrieved from different digital libraries) and information visualisation (in particular, the automatic generation of surrogates and presentation of fused retrieved data).