Context-aware metadata creation in a heterogeneous mobile environment

With an exponentially-growing amount of digital information, data management is becoming increasingly burdensome for an average user. We propose an enhancement to the existing media-management techniques which utilizes the context available in the surrounding environment around the time a media file is created. This context information is associated with the file to provide enhanced data categorization and searching capabilities. A typical scenario considered in our design involves a heterogeneous environment where users capture digital images using camera-enabled mobile devices, such as iPAQs. Concurrently, these mobile agents also collect environmental data from a variety of sensors and other surrounding wirelessly-enabled devices. At the time of image capture, mobile devices collect and process environmental information, which is then associated with the digital image in the form of metadata. Association of the context with the image makes it possible to build user applications with context-based image classification and query facilities. Our system includes such a GUI application, which provides an image query mechanism based on metadata attributes collected at the time of a picture. Our preliminary evaluation of the system validates successful metadata creation and association with the media files and demonstrates the enhanced searching and classification capabilities using a GUI application.