A service-oriented grid infrastructure for multimedia management and search

Nowadays, digital libraries are inherently dispersed over several peers of a steadily increasing network. Dedicated peers may provide specialized, computationally expensive services such as image similarity search. Usually, the peers of such a network are uncoordinated in the sense that their content and services are not linked together. Nevertheless, users expect to transparently access and modify all the (multimedia) content anytime from anywhere not only in an efficient and effective but also consistent way. To match these demands, future digital libraries require an infrastructure that combines various information technologies like databases, service-oriented architectures, peer-to-peer and grid computing. In this paper, we sketch such an infrastructure and illustrate how an example digital library application can work atop it. In detail, we show how similarity search is supported by this infrastructure, and discuss how query distribution and load balancing based on domain-specific knowledge can be exploited by the infrastructure to reduce query response times.