Definition of MIR methodology

This final chapter of Part One depicts the aims and objectives of the MIR, stylizing the whole speech by summaries and paradigms of its methodological and operational principles, and tables and examples of analysis and search processes of multimedia documents. It has been concluded that IR is a search system via terms of textual documents, which also applied to visual documents, audio and audio-visual; MIR, rather, proposes itself as a means of searching through texts, images and sounds for documents of any type or multimedia kind. The basis of the theory of MIR, in any case, does not reject the possibility of interpretation and conceptual representation of the content documented, and of the document itself. Taking into account the semantic limits of the content-based system, an intellectual intervention in the search process is often necessary to clarify the strategy and to enhance possibilities of retrieval. This need to integrate content-related and semantic access to documents should lead to the definition of a unique and organic system of treatment of multimedia information, able to simultaneously consider the research needs of both semantics-interpretive and content-related objective nature. All the search procedures, textual, visual, audio and audio-visual, can operate in continuous interaction and organically, in a single system and with a unique search interface, in the composition of a search formula that combines texts, images, sounds and terms, and can be used to search for highly composite documents whose information content extends to all levels of sense and meaning. The speech concludes, after a proposal for a theory of MIR, through the recapitulation of the principles, and a broad definition and distinction of the specific theoretical aspects of TR, VR, VDR and AR.