Unified Access to Heterogeneous Audiovisual Archives Y. Avrithis, G. Stamou, M. Wallace (National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, iavr@image.ntua.gr, gstam@image.ntua.gr, wallace@image.ntua.gr) F. Marques, P. Salembier, X. Giro (Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain, ferran@gps.tsc.upc.es, philippe@gps.tsc.upc.es, xgiro@gps.tsc.upc.es) W. Haas, H. Vallant and M. Zufferey (Joanneum Research, Austria, werner.haas@joanneum.at, heribert.vallant@joanneum.at, michael.zufferey@joanneum.at) Abstract: In this paper, an integrated information system is presented that offers enhanced search and retrieval capabilities to users of heterogeneous digital audiovisual (a/v) archives. This innovative system exploits the advances in handlings a/v content and related metadata, as introduced by MPEG-4 and worked out by MPEG-7, to of- fer advanced services characterized by the tri-fold ”semantic phrasing of the request (query)”, ”unified handling” and ”personalized response”. The proposed system is tar- geting the intelligent extraction of semantic information from a/v and text related data taking into account the nature of the queries that users my issue, and the context determined by user profiles. It also provides a personalization process of the response in order to provide end-users with desired information. From a technical point of view, the FAETHON system plays the role of an intermediate access server residing between the end users and multiple heterogeneous audiovisual archives organized according to the new MPEG standards. Key Words: FAETHON, audiovisual archive, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, thesaurus, search engine, semantic query, personalization, user profile. Category: H.2.5, H.3.1, H.3.3, H.5.1 1 Introduction Digital archiving of multimedia content including video, audio, still images and various types of documents has been recognized by content holding organiza- tions as a mature choice for the preservation, preview and partial distribution of their assets. The advance in computer and data networks along with the success of standardization efforts of MPEG and JPEG boosted the movement of the archives towards the conversion of their fragile and manually indexed material to digital computer accessible data. By the end of the last century, the attempt has been to develop intelligent and efficient human computer interaction sys- tems, enabling the user to access vast amounts of heterogeneous information, stored in different sites and archives. In order to achieve this objective metadata are attached to the original data. Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 9, no. 6 (2003), 510-519 submitted: 27/3/03, accepted: 17/3/03, appeared: 28/6/03  J.UCS