The START multimedia information system: Current technology and future directions

TitleThe START multimedia information system: Current technology and future directions
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsKatz B, Jimmy Lin, Felshin S
Conference NameIn Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimedia Information Systems (MIS 2002)
Date Published2002///
Abstract

To address the problem of information overload intoday’s world, we have developed Start, a natural
language question answering system that provides
users with high-precision multimedia information ac-
cess through the use of natural language annota-
tions. To address the difficulty of accessing large
amounts of heterogeneous data, we have developed
Omnibase, which assists Start by integrating struc-
tured and semistructured Web databases into a sin-
gle, uniformly structured “virtual database.” Our
ultimate goal is to develop a computer system that
acts like a “smart reference librarian,” and we be-
lieve we have laid a firm foundation for achieving our
goal. This paper describes our current implemented
system and discusses future research directions.