Normally lecturers who have a large collection of visual materials do not have a convenient way to make them accessible to the students. In most cases, they can be only selectively shown to students during lectures. Even though such materials are sometimes made available through libraries, the number of copies is usually too small to meet the demand, and lecturers may be reluctant to provide such materials in this manner due to the subsequent lack of control over their uses. Although WWW provides an attractive platform for delivery of educational visual resources, it does not necessarily lead to a successful educational application. Without having a proper information model and a range of tools to support both provision and access of such resources on the Web, the medium may fail.
Students prefer more approaches to retrieval of information than just keyword search.
The possibility to be able to browse visual resources is strongly demanded as an equally important approach for information retrieval along with the keyword search. However, no systems have been found which could largely satisfy our user's requirements. They either lack means to allow students to browse the visual resources or means to enable lecturers to supply the resources on the Web easily and in a federal manner. Therefore, the objective of the work reported in this paper is to reduce the gap so as to increase teachers' power to manage and deliver visual materials, and to increase students' power to discover and access visual resources relevant to their learning needs. The remainder of this paper will first provide a description of a system which aims to meet the user requirements listed above.