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This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a local orientation and navigation framework based on visual features that provide location recognition, context augmentation, and viewer localization information to a blind or low‐vision user.

The authors consider three types of “visual noun” features: signage, visual‐text, and visual‐icons that are proposed as a low‐cost method for augmenting environments. These are used in combination with an RGB‐D sensor and a simplified SLAM algorithm to develop a framework for navigation assistance suitable for the blind and low‐vision users.

It was found that signage detection cannot only help a blind user to find a location, but can also be used to give accurate orientation and location information to guide the user navigating a complex environment. The combination of visual nouns for orientation and RGB‐D sensing for traversable path finding can be one of the cost‐effective solutions for navigation assistance for blind and low‐vision users.

This is the first step for a new approach in self‐localization and local navigation of a blind user using both signs and 3D data. The approach is meant to be cost‐effective but it only works in man‐made scenes where a lot of signs exist or can be placed and are relatively permanent in their appearances and locations.

Based on 2012 World Health Organization, 285 million people are visually impaired, of which 39 million are blind. This project will have a direct impact on this community.

Signage detection has been widely studied for assisting visually impaired people in finding locations, but this paper provides the first attempt to use visual nouns as visual features to accurately locate and orient a blind user. The combination of visual nouns with 3D data from an RGB‐D sensor is also new.

Developing countries are endeavoring to advance into the 21st century information age. Their progress, however, is hamstrung by the dire lack of trained, skilled and knowledgeable IS workers who are able to interact with online and off‐line information sources. These countries can tap from the rich intellectual capital lying dormant within the ranks of disabled people to boost the pool of IS workers in their societies. However, before developing countries can draw on the information systems capabilities of disabled workers, these workers themselves must be able to function at par with their able‐bodied counterparts as information workers. This presupposes the availability of special‐purpose information systems devices and approaches developed for disabled users. In this paper, therefore, we examine several issues that are pertinent to IS and disabled people in developing countries, and propose an integrated infrastructure to enhance the interaction of disabled people with on‐line information sources. The study includes issues related to the suitability of different interaction methodologies and technologies for people with disabilities. Additionally, we propose the design of customized interfaces that can be used by disabled people to develop Web‐based database applications and to access and query on‐line databases.

This paper outlines the evolution of an approach to building multimedia database applications for research and learning in an Australian university. This has involved an ongoing collaboration between the library, as database developer, together with research scholars and course managers, as application directors and discipline consultants. The paper provides details of three particular projects, the Australian Zooarchaeology image database, the fourteenth century music database and Audio Visual online. Each application has used the technological infrastructure provided by the library to develop unique and successful approaches to research and learning. All, in different ways, take advantage of the many new multimedia capabilities of the WWW and suggest that such an approach could be developed into a working model for building sustainable quality multimedia Web resources for research and learning.

Developing macro queries in software systems is a complex task for many users. Geographical information systems (GIS) are large software systems that require much effort to develop expertise in. A functional programming design approach has a number of distinct strengths that can be represented in a graphical query language interface to aid users in macro query development. A visual functional query language (VFQL) for Geographical Information Systems is presented and its strengths and weaknesses discussed. The system is based on a visual functional programming design approach. This offers a consistent, non‐procedural, strongly typed environment where users can develop their own higher order functions. The approach integrates functional programming, visual programming and knowledge and rules. VFQL’s effectiveness is evaluated compared with a text based command language for GIS macro query development. The results of an experiment indicate that users could develop solutions to simpler tasks more quickly and with fewer errors than a comparative text based command language. On more complex tasks there was no significant difference. From this we deduce that VFQL demonstrates certain design features to help the development of macros or small programs for users but that the complexity of the problem in difficult tasks is likely to be the most important determinant of the error rate and time to complete the task.

Analysis of user viewing and query‐matching behavior furnishes additional evidence that the relevance of retrieved images for system users may arise from descriptions of objects and content‐based elements that are not evident or not even present in the image. This investigation looks at how users assign pre‐determined query terms to retrieved images, as well as looking at a post‐retrieval process of image engagement to user cognitive assessments of meaningful terms. Additionally, affective/emotion‐based query terms appear to be an important descriptive category for image retrieval. A system for capturing (eliciting) human interpretations derived from cognitive engagements with viewed images could further enhance the efficiency of image retrieval systems stemming from traditional indexing methods and technology‐based content extraction algorithms. An approach to such a system is posited.

Knowledge discovery in databases aims to discover useful and significant information from multiple databases. However, in the remote sensing field, the large size of discovered information makes it hard to manually look for interesting information quickly and easily. The purpose of this paper is to automate the process of identifying interesting spatiotemporal knowledge (expressed as rules).

The proposed approach is based on case‐based reasoning (CBR) process. CBR allows the recognition of useful and interesting rules by simulating a human reasoning process, and combining objective and subjective interestingness measures. It takes advantage of statistics' power from objective criteria and the reliability of subjective criteria. This helps improve the discovery of interesting rules by taking into consideration the different properties of interestingness measures.

The proposed approach combines several interestingness measures with complementary properties to improve the detection of the interesting rules. Based on a CBR process, it, also, offers three main advantages to users in a remote sensing field: automatism, integration of the users' expectations and combination of several interestingness measures while taking into account the reliability of each one. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and compared to other approaches using several real‐world datasets.

This study reports a valuable decision support tool for engineers, environmental authority and personnel who want to identify relevant discovered rules. The resulting rules are useful for many fields such as: disaster prevention and monitoring, growth volume and crops on farm or grassland, planting status of agricultural products, and tree distribution of forests.

By using two cognitive tools, metaphors and analogies, structural concepts can be made more observable and touchable for architects. These tools can help architects and designers to physically demonstrate structural concepts for better understanding. Since familiarity with the structural concepts is imperative for architects, it is important to determine the extent in which architects sharpen and solidify their understanding of structural concept using two very valuable cognitive tools, metaphors and analogies. Although in recent years, the number of studies focusing on the usage of metaphor and analogy was on the rise, very few works have included views and opinions of correspondent users in the architectural domain. Furthermore, having both metaphor and analogy under one investigation could help the researcher to see which one, metaphor or analogy, professional architects prefer to use more and which one of them architects use in various stages in their design process. In this regard, purposive sampling was applied to collect the data from ten professional Iranian architects who had the experience of working in this domain for more than 10 years. The participants of this study went through a semi-structured interview and their reports were analysed qualitatively. The findings reveal that while designing, Iranian professional architects do not have any preferences because they can equally apply both metaphors and analogies, but when dealing with their students in academic setting, using metaphor as a cognitive tool can lead to better results. Furthermore, Iranian architects use metaphor more in the initial stages of the architectural design process because according to them this physiognomic perception enhance understanding of a design situation and stimulate creative solutions to the problem at hand. Conversely, analogy is mainly used in the concept generation phase.

Web‐based document management applications serve to store, organize, and manage a collection of documents within the context of a building project. The organization of documents, using mechanisms for indexing and relating these, aims to build an information structure that supports effective searching and browsing. We present a methodology for a stronger integration of project documents of different formats into a rich, highly interrelated, information structure. Specifically, we propose a decomposition of project documents by content in relation to a semantic structure for the categorization of document components. We consider a notion of typologies from architecture as a guide for constructing such a semantic structure. We discuss the application of this methodology to building projects, and propose its use in Web‐based document management applications in the AEC industry. As an illustration of this methodology, we describe a prototype application, as a presentation tool for architectural analyses in an educational context.