Conclusions and Technology Directions

As described in Chapter 2, the motivation for the CBAM study began with considering how multimedia resource agents could be inserted into InfoSleuth-like environments. This unveiled a suite of constraints and technologies which percolate up from the resource agents into the multi-resource planning, information modeling, and media interaction metaphors required for content-based multimedia in InfoSleuth. In general, this study has confirmed the mindset of the InfoSleuth approach in CBAM type applications. In particular, the following two opportunities are evident: ■ The ability to detect content-based concepts as patterns of content abstractions across multiple information sources and over temporal histories. In other words, the InfoSleuth approach enables multi-source information collection and multi-source monitoring over temporal sequences — such multi-source primitives have yet to be applied in a content-based multimedia environment. ■ The ability to separate the concept (or semantic) space from the document (or data) space and introduce dynamic association operators. This is a key concept in InfoSleuth that manifest a scalable and dynamic information network. This separation holds in CBAM applications and provides a natural process of wrapping multimedia semantic content extraction algorithms in resource agents that interact with the information network.