Multimedia Mining: A Highway to Intelligent Multimedia Documents brings together experts in digital media content analysis, state-of-art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, knowledge engineers and domain experts from diverse applied disciplines.

Multimedia documents are ubiquitous and often required, if not essential, in many applications today. This phenomenon has made multimedia documents widespread and extremely large. There are tools for managing and searching within these collections, but the need for tools to extract hidden useful knowledge embedded within multimedia objects is becoming pressing and central for many decision-making applications. The tools needed today are tools for discovering relationships between objects or segments within multimedia document components, such as classifying images based on their content, extracting patterns in sound, categorizing speech and music, and recognizing and tracking objects in video streams.

Data mining essentially relies on several mathematical disciplines, many of which are presented in this second edition of this book. Topics include partially ordered sets, combinatorics, general topology, metric spaces, linear spaces, graph theory. To motivate the reader a significant number of applications of these mathematical tools are included ranging from association rules, clustering algorithms, classification, data constraints, logical data analysis, etc. The book is intended as a reference for researchers and graduate students. The current edition is a significant expansion of the first edition. We strived to make the book self-contained and only a general knowledge of mathematics is required. More than 700 exercises are included and they form an integral part of the material. Many exercises are in reality supplemental material and their solutions are included.

Multimedia Mining: A Highway to Intelligent Multimedia Documents brings together experts in digital media content analysis, state-of-art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, knowledge engineers and domain experts from diverse applied disciplines. Multimedia documents are ubiquitous and often required, if not essential, in many applications today. This phenomenon has made multimedia documents widespread and extremely large. There are tools for managing and searching within these collections, but the need for tools to extract hidden useful knowledge embedded within multimedia objects is becoming pressing and central for many decision-making applications. The tools needed today are tools for discovering relationships between objects or segments within multimedia document components, such as classifying images based on their content, extracting patterns in sound, categorizing speech and music, and recognizing and tracking objects in video streams.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of three workshops held as part of the 8th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2002, in Prague, Czech Republic, in March 2002.The 43 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from approximately 130 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML and metadata, extraction of structure information and transformation of XML documents, querying of XML, XML database systems and performance evaluation, video retrieval, multimedia retrieval, intelligent documents, Web documents, system architectures, query processing, Internet and databases, adaptable databases, and large databases.

1 WorkshopTheme Digital multimedia di?ers from previous forms of combined media in that the bits that represent text, images, animations, and audio, video and other signals can be treated as data by computer programs. One facet of this diverse data in termsofunderlyingmodelsandformatsisthatitissynchronizedandintegrated, hence it can be treated as integral data records. Such records can be found in a number of areas of human endeavour. Modern medicine generates huge amounts of such digital data. Another - ample is architectural design and the related architecture, engineering and c- struction (AEC) industry. Virtual communities (in the broad sense of this word, which includes any communities mediated by digital technologies) are another example where generated data constitutes an integral data record. Such data may include data about member pro?les, the content generated by the virtual community, and communication data in di?erent formats, including e-mail, chat records, SMS messages, videoconferencing records. Not all multimedia data is so diverse. An example of less diverse data, but data that is larger in terms of the collected amount, is that generated by video surveillance systems, where each integral data record roughly consists of a set of time-stamped images - the video frames. In any case, the collection of such in- gral data records constitutes a multimedia data set. The challenge of extracting meaningful patterns from such data sets has led to the research and devel- ment in the area of multimedia data mining.