Improving the usefulness of multimedia archives by applying data reduction techniques

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing amount of personal images, video, sound and text data are captured and stored in a digital format. Increased storage capacity at lower cost entice us to attempt to store everything, but without effective information retrieval techniques, the usefulness of the data becomes limited.

Some people have taken personal data capture to extremes and have begun to capture digitally all aspects of their life, which creates enormous archives of multimedia data. This is not a new idea: in 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote his visionary article “As We May Think” where he described Memex, the first Human Digital Memory (HDM). Today we have projects like Microsoft MyLifeBits building on the Memex vision, however there has been little focus on organizing this kind of data effectively.

By applying data reduction, we show the benefits of removing redundancy from HDMs, and illustrate how the same data reduction framework can be used to effectively support information access from HDMs.