U.S. - Japan Joint Seminar: International Digital Library Annotation and Resource Discovery of Geographical Image Data

0137140 Zhang This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on annotation and resource discovery of geographical image data to be held in Karuizawa, Japan from October 9-11, 2002. The co-organizers are Professor Aidong Zhang of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and Dr. Frederic Andres of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan. This meeting will discuss research results of a current U.S.-Japan project on metadata modeling, resource discovery, and querying of large-scale geographical image datasets. The seminar aims to demonstrate the current research achievement, clarify a variety of questions, and identify promising areas for future joint work. The specific topics include: 1) extracting semantic features of geographic images, 2) detecting clusters of arbitrary shape of geographic images, 3) formulating the metadata for the integrated system to direct a query to relevant databases, 4) establishing a theoretical foundation of resource selection approaches based on the metadata, and 5) query processing to support content-based retrieval of geographic images. The researcher's current project investigates novel approaches to supporting effective and efficient access to various geographic image databases over the Internet. These approaches establish a foundation for creating a meta-level system on top of geographic image databases to support distributed geographic image retrieval. Through this project a huge volume of geographic data (JIOMEDIA) is being collected and classified based on the semantics. This asset will be accessible by users for research and educational purposes. A set of software tools is being developed and will be made available for use of establishing a metaserver environment which manages large-scale geographic data resources. The seminar advances international human resources through the participation of many postdocs and graduate students with some of them presenting papers. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the seminar on their Web pages.