Patent ID: 8396331

Claim:
A method for generating a vocabulary for non-textual items, comprising: under control of one or more processors configured with executable instructions: providing a source dataset of a first type comprising a plurality of items of the first type; identifying features in the source dataset; and generating a plurality of words associated with the features to form a single vocabulary, the single vocabulary serving as a mechanism for use in retrieving items from plural different target datasets of different types in response to queries made to the plural different target datasets, wherein: the different types comprise different themes or scenes, each word of the plurality of words is associated with a weight with respect to a particular document, the weight being determined based on multiplying a term frequency (TF) of the word with an inverse document frequency (IDF) of the word, the term frequency of each word with respect to the particular document comprises a normalized frequency of the word in the particular document, the inverse document frequency of each word determines whether the word is useful for distinguishing a relevant document from an irrelevant document based on how frequently the word appears in a plurality of documents, and the inverse document frequency of each word is determined based on a logarithmic function of a ratio between a total number of documents in a database and a total number of documents in which the word appears.