Our research goal is to facilitate the sharing of stories with digital photographs. Some map websites now collect stories associated with peoples' relationships to places. Users map collections of places and include their intangible emotional associations with each location along with photographs, videos, etc. Though this framework of mapping stories is important, it is not sufficiently expressive to communicate stories in a narrative fashion. For example, when the number of the mapped collections of places is particularly large, it is neither easy for viewers to interpret the map nor is it easy for the creator to express a story as a series of events in the real world. This is because each narrative, in the form of a sequence of textual narratives, a sequence of photographs, a movie, or audio is mapped to just one point. As a result, it is up to the viewer to decide which points on the map must be read, and in what order. The conventional framework is fairly suitable for mapping and expressing fragments or snapshots of a whole story and not for conveying the whole story as a narrative using the entire map as the setting. We therefore propose a new framework, Spatial Slideshow, for mapping personal photo collections and representing them as stories such as route guidances, sightseeing guidances, historical topics, fieldwork records, personal diaries, and so on. It is a fusion of personal photo mapping and photo storytelling. Each story is conveyed through a sequence of mapped photographs, presented as a synchronized animation of a map and an enhanced photo slideshow. The main technical novelty of this paper is a method for creating three-dimensional animations of photographs that induce the visual effect of motion from photo to photo. We believe that the proposed framework may have considerable significance in facilitating the grassroots development of spatial content driven by visual communication concerning real-world locations or events.

This paper surveys recent research activities on three major areas of digital media information base, namely, video database systems as a typical example of temporal application, database systems for mixed reality as an instance of spatial application, and kansei management for digital media retrieval as a case of humanistic feelings application. Current research results by the project Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments are reported.

Queries to generate a map from geographic detabases are too large and complex for users to specify all components in it. Thematic parts of the map should be described by users as ad hoc queries. However, background parts of it should be inferred from users' queries corresponding to the thematic parts. Furthermore, it is important for the map systems to lead users' constructing their ad hoc queries and to infer visualization methods applied to the data retrieved by the ad hoc queries. This paper discusses a framework to infer supplemental queries and visualization methods in order to make the retrieval results into a feasible map using geographic domain hierarchical levels, geographic domain thesauruses and existing example queries. The framework allows users to know mismatches of components in queries, inappropriate queries for maps, and deriving candidates for additional components in queries.

This paper proposes a new framework of managing virtual spaces based on spatial databases as an extension of VRML-based systems. The framework is suitable for treating continuous virtual spaces and for managing the quality of service (QoS) of the virtual spaces depending on user's operations and situations of computer resources. Levels of detail (LoD) of 3D objects is the most important rule for rendering scenes dynamically while managing the QoS. This paper describes a method of managing the QoS depending on the LoD in the form of spatial queries. An advantage of the framework is that spatial databases can incrementally construct virtual spaces in clients using differential descriptions based on VRML, that is, DVRML, proposed in this paper. Dynamic spatial data such as avatar's movement and real-time multimedia data such as videos should be shared by all participants in a virtual space in real time. Our framework can also handle dynamic spatial data by means of real-time updating of some spatial objects in spatial databases as well as static spatial data. We developed some experimental applications based on the framework in order to prove that it is feasible for networked virtual spaces with video components.