Automating envisionment of virtual meeting room histories

This paper addresses the problem of how to automatically generate visual representations of recorded histories of distributed multimedia collaborations. The work reported here focuses mainly on what we consider to be an innovative approach to this problem, viz., the use of a temporal representation format that displays the generic meta-information associated with multimedia content in a way that lets users focus on and access the associated content of interest. As a concrete example of the use of meta-information, consider a user who would like to access any historical segments containing video of a particular collaborator. A meta-information-based approach can assist in this search by finding all the times at which the known video channel used by that person was in fact operative.