Video and Audio: Organization and Retrieval in the WWW

The current World Wide Web does not adequately support the retrieval and exchange of continuous media, such as video and audio data. Inappropriate network transmission protocols, the lack of flexible access methods, as well as the lack of architectures that encourage the efficient reuse of continuous media, have been major factors preventing the widespread use of video and audio. This paper addresses this problem and proposes a continuous media model which integrates meta-information in continuous media in order to support the flexible and efficient reuse of video and audio data in the World Wide Web. Several classes of meta-information are identified to facilitate the hierarchical access, browsing, search, and dynamic composition of continuous media. Implementations of tools for the extraction and construction of continuous media meta-information are described. 1 Introduction World Wide Web development has traditionally focused on methods for the fast retrieval of documents consistin..