Deliverable 5.2 - the School of Engineering and Design - Brunel ...

ICT Project 3D VIVANT– Deliverable 5.2Contract no.:248420Search & Retrieval Mechanisms &Tools2 FRAMEWORK ARCHITECTURE AND GRAPHICAL USERINTERFACEThe search and retrieval framework was developed to have a modular and easily expandable sourcecode for further future improvements based on the upcoming requirements. With this concept inmind, most of the components of the framework are thread based classes that work independently ofthe other classes and interconnect and exchange data through the application’s root process. Thisapproach enabled us to perform and test several configurations until the final decision. A roughschematic diagram of the framework’s architecture is presented in Figure 1.Graphical User InterfaceDescriptorextractor threadsDatabasethreadSearch process and resultspresentation threadLoggerthreadFigure 1: Search and Retrieval framework architectureThe descriptor extractor threads are triggered to extract one of the supported descriptoralgorithms in the selected database. After of the descriptor extraction process is finished thethreads terminate. A new thread is started each time a new database should be processed.The database thread keeps track of the access to the filesystem database and mainly keeps inmemory the index of the database to be ready for search queries. The database thread lifespan is for the entire applications uptime and thus it is considered permanent thread.The search process thread is started each time a new search query is posed on the system.After processing the query, asking the database for similar content, and building the rankedlist of the results the thread terminates.Finally, the logger thread keeps track of all the actions that occur from the start to the end ofthe application’s lifecycle and displays them in a window of the UI.The Search and Retrieval Framework was developed as a multi-document interface (MDI)environment in order to support multiple functionalities in parallel. The startup UI is presented inFigure 2. At the top of the UI there is a toolbar menu with all the available functionalities as well assome icon buttons for the most common features. The toolbar from left to right has a search menu, adatabase preparation menu, an options menu, a“window” tiling and navigation menu, and a “help”that navigates the user to the “about” window for information about the software.4/03/2013 8