Affiliations: Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, University
of Milano, Milano, Italy (e-mail: bertino@dsi.unimi.it ) | Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze
dell'Informazione, University of Genova, Genova, Italy (e-mail:
catania@disi.unigw.it) | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),
Paris, France (e-mail: zarri@ivry.cnrs.fr)
Abstract: Metadata represent the vehicle by which digital documents can be
efficiently indexed and retrieved. The need for such kind of information is
particularly evident in multimedia digital libraries, which store documents
dealing with different types of media (text, images, sound, video). In this
context, a relevant metadata function consists in superimposing some sort of
conceptual organization over the unstructured information space proper to these
digital repositories, in order to facilitate the intelligent retrieval of the
original documents. To this purpose, the usage of conceptual annotations seems
quite promising. In this paper, we propose a two-steps annotation approach by
which conceptual annotations, represented in NKRL (Narrative Knowledge
Representation Language) [7,8], are associated with multimedia documents
and used during retrieval operations. We then present how documents and
metadata can be stored and managed on persistent storage.
Keywords: multimedia document, digital library, metadata, conceptual annotation, XML
