A three-level user interface to multimedia digital libraries with relaxation and restriction

This paper proposes a three-level user interface to document-rich digital libraries. Not only typical document metadata information but also document contents and personal annotations can be used to select digital documents, and afterward a two-dimension matrix can be used to relax or restrict the selections. Our approach to document retrieval called “three-level user interface” employs a database query language with intelligent multimedia retrieval techniques. Queries can be constituted with metadata information about documents in the first level. In the second level, queries can be constituted with document contents, the contents based on the corresponding document type definition. In the third level, for sophisticated users semantic approaches are used for queries. Users are asked for annotations or heuristics with their subjective meanings. In each level, however, a matrix based query can be used to either restrict for finitely many selections or relax for few selections. The contribution of this paper includes inventing a framework for multimedia document retrieval facility in which query conditions can be efficiently related or restricted for an appropriate number of documents