Implementation of an on-site web multimedia collector

The object collector is an important component in a Web search engine. A collector collects Web objects (text, image, video, etc.), extracts their features and builds an index file for the search engine. Sending each object to the collector is almost always the worst option with respect to resource usage. An alternative is to send a collector to the source site, which has an advantage of distributing computational load and performing summarisation and compression. In an early paper, we proposed a lightweight collector for distributed object cataloguing over the World Wide Web. This paper discuss the issues of design and implementation. We provide a prototype and the Java class descriptions. We also present the performance of the prototype. Crown Copyright (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.