Multimedia documents description by ordered hierarchies: the ToCAI description scheme

The authors present the ToCAI (Table of Content Analytical Index) framework, a description scheme (DS) for content description of audio-visual (AV) documents. The idea for such a description scheme comes from the structures used for indexing technical books (table of content and analytical index). This description scheme provides therefore a hierarchical description of the time sequential structure of a multimedia document (ToC), suitable for browsing, together with an "Analytical Index" (AI) of the key items of the document, suitable for retrieval. The AI allows one to represent in a ordered way the items of the AV document which are most relevant from the semantic point of view. The ordering criteria are therefore selected according to the application context. The detailed structure of the DS is presented by means of UML notation and an application example is also shown.