Computational mereology: A study of part-of relations for multimedia indexing

How to index or retrieve multimedia objects is by no means obvious, because the computer can retrieve right multimedia material only if it reasons about its contents. We show that it is possible to write formal specifications of this reasoning process using set theory and mereology. We discuss the theoretical consequences of trying to use mereology and set theory for multimedia indexing and retrieval. We re-examine the roles of mereology and set theory in knowledge representation. We conclude that both commonsense set theories and mereologies should play the role of constraining databases of arbitrary multimedia objects, e.g. video clips. But although both should be viewed as database constraints, we argue that part-of hierarchies should be used to encode relatively permanent background knowledge, elsewhere names the referential level, while member-of hierarchies should describe arbitrary multimedia records. We also propose a language and a set of axioms, SetNM, for natural mereologies with sets. A multimedia indexing system can then be viewed as a particular SetNM theory. © 1995 J.C. Baltzer AG, Science Publishers.