MULTIMEDIA DATABASE SYSTEM Paper Presentation And PPT

The ARKive-ERA project is focused on investigating how best to design the underlying technological infrastructures to enable large multimedia database systems to maximize the educational potential of their multimedia assets, for users from very diverse range of backgrounds and in a wide variety of contexts. The focus for the research has been the ARKive project a large multimedia Web-based database system under development, containing diverse data related to endangered animal, plant and fungi species and their habitats as well as more common UK species. ARKive type projects are designed to serve the needs of their diverse potential users by providing tools for individuals and communities of users to ‘annotate’ the content of the database so as to make the content more valuable to others with similar interests. The need for these types of user support and tools was identified while conducting pre-design user studies with specialist user groups. The needs center around the limitations of current on-line museum and library systems that do not provide support for users to annotate or ‘tag’ multimedia objects of relevance to their particular ‘community of interest’ or with specialized indexing terms. Tagging would enable specialized resource discovery and knowledge sharing with other members of their communities.