Visual Database Systems 4

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibility of interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

Both the way we look at data, through a DBMS, and the nature of data we ask a DBMS to manage have drastically evolved over the last decade, moving from text to images (and to sound to a lesser extent). Visual representations are used extensively within new user interfaces. Powerful visual approaches are being experimented for data manipulation, including the investigation of three dimensional display techniques. Similarly, sophisticated data visualization techniques are dramatically improving the understanding of the information extracted from a database. On the other hand, more and more applications use images as basic data or to enhance the quality and richness of data manipulation services. Image management has opened a wide area of new research topics in image understanding and analysis. The IFIP 2.6 Working Group on Databases strongly believes that a significant mutual enrichment is possible by confronting ideas, concepts and techniques supporting the work of researcher and practitioners in the two areas of visual interfaces to DBMS and DBMS management of visual data. For this reason, IFIP 2.6 has launched a series of conferences on Visual Database Systems. The first one has been held in Tokyo, 1989. VDB-2 was held in Budapest, 1991. This conference is the third in the series. As the preceding editions, the conference addresses researchers and practitioners active or interested in user interfaces, human-computer communication, knowledge representation and management, image processing and understanding, multimedia database techniques and computer vision.

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995) (Kobla et aI. , 1997). Through the inte gration of technologies such as image processing, speech/character recognition and natural language understanding, keywords can be extracted and associated with these shots for indexing (Wactlar et aI. , 1996). A single shot, however, rarely carries enough amount of information to be meaningful by itself. Usu ally, it is a semantically meaningful interval that most users are interested in re trieving. Generally, such meaningful intervals span several consecutive shots. There hardly exists any efficient and reliable technique, either automatic or manual, to identify all semantically meaningful intervals within a video stream. Works by (Smith and Davenport, 1992) (Oomoto and Tanaka, 1993) (Weiss et aI. , 1995) (Hjelsvold et aI. , 1996) suggest manually defining all such inter vals in the database in advance. However, even an hour long video may have an indefinite number of meaningful intervals. Moreover, video data is multi interpretative. Therefore, given a query, what is a meaningful interval to an annotator may not be meaningful to the user who issues the query. In practice, manual indexing of meaningful intervals is labour intensive and inadequate.

This volume contains three keynote papers and 51 technical papers from contributors around the world on topics in the research and development of database systems, such as Data Modelling, Object-Oriented Databases, Active Databases, Data Mining, Heterogeneous Databases, Distributed Databases, Parallel Query Processing, Multi-Media Databases, Transaction Management Systems, Document Databases, Temporal Databases, Deductive Databases, User Interface, and Advanced Database Applications.

The three-volume set LNCS 12681-12683 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2021, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in April 2021. The total of 156 papers presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 490 submissions. The topic areas for the selected papers include information retrieval, search and recommendation techniques; RDF, knowledge graphs, semantic web, and knowledge management; and spatial, temporal, sequence, and streaming data management, while the dominant keywords are network, recommendation, graph, learning, and model. These topic areas and keywords shed the light on the direction where the research in DASFAA is moving towards. Due to the Corona pandemic this event was held virtually.

This volume is the first in a series which aims to contribute to the wider dissemination of the results of research and development in database systems for non-traditional applications and non-traditional machine organizations. It contains updated versions of selected papers from the First International Symposium on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.

Great advances have been made in the database field. Relational and object- oriented databases, distributed and client/server databases, and large-scale data warehousing are among the more notable. However, none of these advances promises to have as great and direct an effect on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as video databases. Video databases will provide a quantum jump in our ability to deal with visual data, and in allowing people to access and manipulate visual information in ways hitherto thought impossible. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications gives practical information on academic research issues, commercial products that have already been developed, and the applications of the future driving this research and development. This book can also be considered a reference text for those entering the field of video or multimedia databases, as well as a reference for practitioners who want to identify the kinds of products needed in order to utilize video databases. Video Database Systems: Issues, Products and Applications covers concepts, products and applications. It is written at a level which is less detailed than that normally found in textbooks but more in-depth than that normally written in trade press or professional reference books. Thus, it seeks to serve both an academic and industrial audience by providing a single source of information about the research issues in the field, and the state-of-the-art of practice.