An architecture of the distributed multimedia information retrieval network with query routing systems

The rapid increase in the use of the world wide web (WWW), along with the increased capacity of transmissions, has led to the need for an efficient architecture to retrieve multimedia information from the internet. To achieve this architecture, we have developed the Query Routing Server (QRS) which selects appropriate multimedia systems and modifies the searching path dynamically dependent on users' properties and environmental factors. Because the QRS works transparently over multimedia system, the legacy multimedia systems can cooperate with one another using the QRS. This means that the QRS allows users not only to retrieve multimedia information from network, but also to use various kinds of search engines without any special operations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the QRS, we made a prototype of the distributed multimedia system with QRS and conducted several experiments which successfully showed the flexibility of the dynamic retrieval networks and the substantial reduction of response time.