Similarity Between Multi-valued Thesaurus Attributes: Theory and Application in Multimedia Systems

In this paper, the theoretical aspects of calculating the similarity between sets, and its generalizations multisets, fuzzy sets and fuzzy multisets, is presented. Afterwards, this theory is applied to enhance the facilities for accessing a multimedia system, namely when searching for correspondence between multi-valued attributes, which are coupled with a thesaurus. Furthermore, to allow flexibility in this search, thesauri with similarities defined between the thesaurus terms are considered. As a possible application, the DEKKMMA project is introduced, a project about an audio archive of African music.