Scientific goals 

The goal of DISCO is to design and experiment generic and flexible searching and indexing techniques dedicated to distributed collections of multi-media documents.

By generic we mean the ability to handle documents of various nature and type: sound, voice, music, images and videos. We aim to process these documents as uniformly as possible. This implies in particular the definition of a common description framework allowing for the sharing of common indexing structures and search operations.

By flexible we mean taking into account the variability of source content access criteria. As illustrated by the aforementioned variety of actors, several typologies of content access must be forecast. Some portals (e.g. those for UGC sites) may accept the exchange of the content itself, while others larger institutional bodies would forbid the access to the content and in contrast go for the broadcast and exchange of references, summaries or ersatz of the content. Our system must rely on a large variety of referencing models, allowing the free exchange of numerous small (in size) resources as well as restricted access to large collections of multi-media documents (e.g., referencing of electronic documents provided and protected by a network of national museums).

Finally we put an emphasis, in the global system design, on the distribution of document sources. It is our belief that the definition of a generic mechanism, customizable to local constraints allows for the common publication of numerous sources and brings an added value not only for the end user who is able to access by a unique search to an unlimited number of collections, but also to the source provider who benefits from a larger referencing and thus from a larger audience attracting new users who would not had visited spontaneously its collections.